


Paradise

by autotunedd



Category: Big Bang (Band), GTOP (Band)
Genre: AU, GTOP, M/M, Sci-Fi, but mostly gross soulmates stuff, very on brand, with horror elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-24 04:24:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 36,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13803345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autotunedd/pseuds/autotunedd
Summary: Jiyong and Seunghyun take a dangerous job, and things quickly unravel.





	1. Prologue

 

**PROLOGUE**

_And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,_  
_That kings for such a tomb would wish to die._  
____

 

A shell skips across the ground and ricochets off his shoe. It disappears into the green manicured grass bordering the path. He keeps walking, his eyes momentarily on the ground in search of other foreign objects. Shadows cast by branches overhead dapple the path with pebbled light. That, and the parade of feet trudging forward, make further inquiry impossible; he is swept up in the tide. Still, there are other things to look at. The woman beside him has bare feet. The sight of her unblemished skin is almost jarring. Jiyong thinks of toes sinking into sand or curling in the warm grass. Her feet represent adventure and possibilities. A mild thrill.  
  
The crowd stops suddenly with him in its centre. Jiyong raises his head. The guide at the front of the pack smiles and gestures towards a building on the right. He has been here before. Monumental sheets of glass make up the building’s façade. Each pane projects three-dimensional affirmations and advertisements from its surface. As the group watches, each pane of glass alters, like tiles flipping over, one by one until the entire face of the building mimics the lush vegetation of the rainforest. The words _nature equals nurture_ expand from the scene and Jiyong nods imperceptibly despite seeing it all before. The soundless agitprop goes through its cycle, panning out through greenery until the building itself appears on the glass in miniature. _Enjoy Optimal Health and Wellbeing: Visit the wellspring_. A rendering of water then flows down the glass, disappearing at ground level. It’s impeccable. The tour-guide returns her gaze to the group and speaks, clipped.  
  
‘This is one of seventeen community centres on Paradise. All information required by our residents can be found within or accessed at one our many kiosks’.  
  
Jiyong waits for the murmur of approval to wash through the group before he asks his question. Sometimes he says nothing, but today he plays along. He is an intruder and the subterfuge makes him feel powerful.  
  
‘I kicked a shell a moment ago. Where did it come from?’  
  
‘There are four beaches on Paradise. The nearest to this community is approximately twelve minutes by shuttle’.  
  
The group is impressed, and the guide continues.  
  
‘Automated cleaners patrol the communities of Paradise continuously. In between each cycle, there is a brief window during which errant materials may be found. The average time for this is approximately two minutes, after which time, any out of place items will be picked up’.  
  
A second murmur of approval arises and Jiyong looks behind him through the throng and waits. After a moment, a small street-cleaner rounds the corner. Innocuous and white, it has a smiling face painted on its side in green. Everything here is green. The machine travels toward them, stopping intermittently to pick things up.  
  
‘Here’s one now,’ the guide says approvingly. ‘Right on time’.  
  
‘Right on time,’ Jiyong answers.  
  
The machine passes them with the shell on board. A simple white box emitting a low thrum, the face on its side is eerie still. Regardless, this demonstration has done its job. The group murmurs together, enamoured with the idea of an orderly society. Tidy hive, tidy mind.  
  
After this, they enter a shuttle and start the journey to their final-destination. Jiyong sits beside the window and watches Paradise blow past him. The shuttles are designed for efficiency, not sight-seeing. Still, he knows what’s out there beyond the glass. Pavements and stores, café’s and meeting places, parks and playgrounds. Beaches with sand and bonafide waves that simulate the tides. Happy people. He rests his head on the glass and imagines a cool breeze blowing in his face, hair erratic in the wind. The woman beside him nudges his shoulder and Jiyong mouths the words as she says them.  
  
‘It sure is something, huh?’  
  
‘Sure is,’ he replies.  
  
‘My partner and I saved up for nineteen years to get here,’ she continues. She pulls a photo from her pocket and Jiyong turns his head to look. ‘We’re so lucky’.  
  
‘I bet’.  
  
‘I work in the seventy-fifth’, she says, referring to a governmental department he is ignorant of. ‘And you?’  
  
‘I kill people’.  
  
The woman smiles, unflinching.  
  
‘The twenty-third?’ she asks, oblivious. She refers to the response of the man meant to be in his seat. The man whose place he has taken on this tour. ‘Wow. What an honour to be in the same tour group as you. Thank-you for your service,’ she says, extending her hand. Jiyong takes it and gives it a squeeze.  
  
‘Well thank-you very much,’ he says. ‘Long live the government, or whatever’.  
  
When they arrive at their destination, Jiyong ambles off the shuttle last and stands a foot apart at the back of the group. He kicks the ground with his heel and relishes the sound it makes. It crunches, the way small bones often do. His eye tics, but the sound of birds relieves it. There is a speaker nearby playing the intermittent chirrup of insects and other small, innocuous animals.  
  
The throng of bodies loosens and parts down the middle. Jiyong is confronted with the money shot. They are in the neighbourhood now. The second best one. Three quarters of the neighbourhoods on Paradise are made up of condominium apartments, but this is premium real estate. Ahead of him stands a single dwelling of a decent size. Enough for two people to live comfortably with space to move and breathe and take a break from one another. The glass and metal structure conforms to its surroundings, a logical fixture between the green trees which pepper the lot. They’re not artificial trees or four-dimensional imaging either, they’re real trees altered to pump out twice the oxygen. You get what you pay for. There is a garden in front of the house with flowers of various colours and genera, each craning toward the sun. They are artificial, like the sky they face, a projection spanning millions of tiles above them to mimic Earth’s day and night, but none of that matters. The flowers feel real, and they smell real. The admixture of true and fake makes everything feel authentic. The uncanniness of the natural makes the neighbourhood feel frightfully alive and intoxicating. A swing hangs from a sturdy tree branch at the side of the property and Jiyong wonders if the man whose place he has taken on this tour is the kind of man who would be interested in that. A few feet further, on schedule, an orange falls from a tree, barely within sight, but he knows where to look. If he squints, he can see where it landed on the grass. A dash of colour. He’d give anything to have an orange.  
  
The guide addresses him specifically by a name that isn’t his and gestures toward the property. She describes its features and amenities but Jiyong has heard it all before. This is the part of the tour where his mind drifts. He slips into his imagination. After years of meditation, fantasy is all too easy. In his mind, he stretches out on the grass in front of him, face pointed toward the artificial sky, shielding his eyes from its brightness with a lazy hand outstretched above him. He wants to live a life where idleness and untrained thought are possible but even here, Seunghyun’s voice dispels his fantasies. In his mind’s eye, Jiyong has grass at his back when Seunghyun speaks.  
  
‘Wasting time again?’  
  
_‘Quiet’._  
  
He opens his eyes, rankled. The guide gestures toward the front door of the structure. This vacant home is waiting for its new owner. His stomach begins to turn from anticipation. She holds out a transparent key-card and Jiyong takes it in his hand, turning it over to see the same emptiness on its back. Of course, it isn’t real. It’s never real.  
  
‘Let’s go inside,’ she says.  
  
The people around him blink out of existence; there one moment and gone the next, each pair of shoes, each haircut, each smiling face, gone. His sudden isolation makes him feel vulnerable, but only for a moment. He steps toward the small gate separating him from the front yard, from the grass and the trees and the comfortable, impossible home ahead of him. He wants to pick a flower. To eat an orange. He wants to kick another shell, but he is compelled forward as the demonstration draws to its close.  
  
_‘Welcome, future resident---’_  
  
As he takes a final step through the gateway and onto the property, sheets of blue rise around him and the scene peels away in fragments until the simulation is over.  
  
He is back in his bunk on the ship with Seunghyun’s sceptical face hovering on his periphery. Jiyong coughs involuntarily, a psychosomatic reaction to the dirty air. Of course, the air was no different in the simulation, he just thought so. He shifts his feet. They feel heavy. His toes recoil against the cold metal. Coming back stings the soul.  
  
Seunghyun slaps him on the back.  
  
‘Did you have a nice holiday?’  
  
‘I told you not to interrupt me’.  
  
He slips the demo’s node from his temple and puts it back into its box. The simulation is old, an advertisement for prospective residents looking to emigrate to Paradise. Seventeen minutes on another world is a treat, no matter how unchanging. Seunghyun swiped it for him. An unscrupulous hack hired them for a job and underpaid, so Seunghyun tracked the guy down and stole whatever wasn’t nailed down. He broke into an armoured compound just to prove that he could. The simulation had no monetary value, but for Jiyong it was priceless. It was a beautiful gift. Seunghyun didn’t go in for fantasies much himself. He wasn’t the type.

  
‘I didn’t mean to drag you out,’ Seunghyun answers, wiping the redness left behind by the node. ‘I need your help’.  
  
Jiyong leans into the touch, faintly miserable.  
  
‘With what?’  
  
‘We might have a job, but I want your opinion before I say yes’.  
  
‘You always choose the jobs. What’s the problem?’  
  
‘I have a funny feeling’.  
  
Jiyong closes his eyes because he knows what that means. Seunghyun thinks one of them will die. He is usually right. Seunghyun is eight deaths deep, and himself six. Most people only survive three revivals. They’ve been lucky. There are no guarantees, now more than ever.  
  
Seunghyun grimaces and touches their foreheads together in a display of uncharacteristic fatigue.  
  
‘It’s a big job but it pays well’.  
  
‘How well?’  
  
‘We could spend six months on an outer planet. Find somewhere cheap. Do nothing all day. Relax’.  
  
Jiyong smiles.  
  
‘Are you trying to retire with me?’  
  
‘We need a break,’ Seunghyun answers. ‘A real one. Not a simulation’.  
  
Jiyong sighs but agrees. They are overdue and he’s getting antsy. Though he finds time for his simulations, the cache on board the ship is ancient and the Paradise demo tugs at his insides. The sex simulations and other louche experiences in the library are old, made using flawed technology. They’re simple, designed to pander to any of a few basic instincts. In the old sims you can cum, kill monsters, or cum inside a monster. Frontier wish fulfillment. The Paradise demo is different. It is full sensory immersion in another, _possible_ life. An unchanging tour in a world he can’t afford. Seunghyun won’t use it, of course. He won’t use any of the sims but Jiyong wishes he would try the Paradise demo. Paradise is _real._ It is a physical place. A few weeks in the right direction and they could arrive there, theoretically. They could kick shells and feel grass between their toes and live in a standalone home with two bedrooms and a shower that uses actual water instead of sandblasting air into every cut and scrape. Jiyong wants that life. He wants Seunghyun to want it too.  
  
At its conception, Paradise was aptly named. Clean air, state of the art medicine, the newest technologies and advancements from the colonies, and nature too, albeit a mix of the real and fake. Paradise is the last place in the known universe with grass and clean water. A sanctuary built into the core of an asteroid; the price of admission so high only two thousand places are ever available, the cost an impossibility for anyone but the richest of the rich. Governmental leaders, organised crime, people with money. The kind of money that buys up planets and moons on the edge of charted space. Vacancies on Paradise are for the people who run the corporations that hire he and Seunghyun to check new moons and asteroids for life and kill whatever can’t be moved or subdued. To date, the worst they’ve come across are a few shady human outposts, illegal settlements by foreign governments and cartels. Hidden storehouses for criminal gains. No moral fortitude required. He is fearful of the fact he might one day come face to face with an honourable squatter; a medical facility doing important research who’ve fallen behind on their debts and are being violently evicted. Good people like that who don’t deserve his violent attention. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when that day comes. Up until now, the choices have been easy. When someone shoots first, his guilt subsides. A wilting line of startled drug manufacturers flowing out of a makeshift habitat with guns blazing is an easy fix, for instance. He does his job. And why? So mega corporations can mine and rape and pillage whatever resources they can from every rock and cloud of dust floating in space. Heroes, all.

  
Seunghyun has the same scruples as him, basically. They are of the same mind regarding most things, just not the future. Seunghyun has no illusions about Paradise. He’s a realist. He doesn’t fantasize about a quiet life down the road. He doesn’t dream about grass beneath his feet, or an idealised heydey. Earth is gone. They scrambled off that planet together leaving blood in their wake. Earth was toxic. Getting off when they did only bought them time, so Seunghyun is pragmatic. A mercenary only lives so long. Earthers even less. Twenty years of breathing poisonous air has put a cap on their life expectancy. At best, they have a decade left and not much more. Jiyong mitigates the pain with fantasy. Seunghyun mitigates his with anger and verisimilitude. He accepts higher paying jobs with greater risk, the ones most likely to involve guerrilla mercenaries fighting for other players; or small-scale wars between competing sides. If you can fight, you’re still alive. So, for years they have taken any well-paying job that involved _force._ Clearing asteroids, running into firefights. It didn’t matter. It still doesn’t. Larger profits mean more weeks the two of them can spend alone together on isolated outposts enjoying the silence and hard-won safety, but there’s no escaping what they do. They kill people. They work for monsters, but who isn’t one? Everyone has a second self. Jiyong too.  
  
He fled Earth with a moniker that has followed him from system to system. He leaned into it. When he did, it helped keep him alive. When the opposition saw the dragon on his tac suit, they often hesitated. Sometimes, reputation was half the battle won. Fear made people vulnerable.

  
*

  
On Earth, you had to do things to survive. He was born in Seoul, near the Goyang chemical plant so he learned, the way everyone learned. Adapt or die. When he was a child, there was an old man in his district. One of the _last_ old men. Before the readjustment, back when the world was different, he was a microbiologist. Over the years, he taught Jiyong a thing or two. The microbial ecosystem had been destroyed. That's why the plants were gone. The rhiobizome had been decimated. The outside had become a dead zone. Hypoxic. Nothing would grow. The old man had lofty dreams and Jiyong gave him credit for wishful thinking. Rhizobia were capable of fixing nitrogen from the air into something biologically useful. If he could find a way to reintroduce the right microbial life, there was hope. A complex symbiosis with fungi and viruses would make it possible for certain plants to thrive in Earth’s geothermal soils. Revivification. Of course, the man had tried for twenty years and got nowhere. Eventually, he gave up the way everyone else gave up, and sooner or later, died. When he did, Jiyong stole his books and then stole others and absorbed what he could from them. He experimented. He toyed with chemicals. He figured out the combinations that would erode metals, burn skin, blind people. Things that were useful in a kill-or-be-killed world. The old man believed in life, but Jiyong was pragmatic and believed in his own life above all others. That was how you survived. You couldn’t go anywhere without protection. If you were alone, you were dead already. Jiyong didn’t have anybody so he invented ways to protect himself, and he was good at it.  
  
He created a devastating weapon by accident. One worse than he intended. He used it one day expecting to burn an attacker but something else happened. He made some error in his calculations, some variation of the recipe. Something mislabelled or mismeasured. Some pollution of his ingredients. The vial he threw to defend himself cracked against his pursuers skin. It got into through the eye maybe, into the bloodstream somehow and then _\--- fire_. Up in flames. Instantaneous. The man who chased him that day was nobody, a dime a dozen thug. Everyone was fighting to survive. Jiyong didn’t mean to kill him, or anybody, he just needed a weapon to slow people down. He needed time to escape when people were pursuing him. Instead, he created something that could burn people alive from the inside out. Spontaneous combustion; every cell exploding in a swift chain reaction from the point of contact outwards, the second it reached the bloodstream. The vials would crack and within seconds there would be heat and a blinding light, and the kind of screams you would never unhear. After that, people seldom bothered him. He figured out how to replicate the formula and he used it when he had to. Word spread.  
  
He didn’t have it on him when he first met Seunghyun. He was ambushed unexpectedly one night. He barely escaped the attack. A dozen men, all starved and corrupted, wanting whatever he had on him. Even if he had nothing, it wouldn’t matter. They would take his shoes and his clothes, take his hair, his organs. Anything was worth money if you had an imagination and the skill to take a body apart. He didn’t see the wire that tripped him as he took a shortcut home. It was a stupid mistake. He was tired. He barely had a moment from when he hit the ground to the first pair of hands tugging at him, dragging him roughly across concrete toward an underpass. As his head bounced against the ground, he saw bodies coming out of the shadows, people coming to take their piece of him. Panic gripped him. He kicked and thrashed and lashed out, and by sheer luck slipped free. He bolted. He made it to a fence, squeezed through a hole that tore at his clothes, and ran. That bought him a few seconds. He ran for his life, each second losing ground. He heard the wash of footsteps behind him, four or five men following him at a sprint. Then he turned a corner, tripped and fell through a wall.  
  
A fake section of wall. Holographic. He found himself in a small recess in the real wall, the space pitch black behind him. He reached out but felt nothing. The entrance to a tunnel maybe. He held his breath as the men bolted past, disappearing up the road, oblivious. He waited a few minutes, shocked at his own mistake. He needed to recalibrate his thoughts. He needed to plan the safest route home. He didn’t think about the wall. It was luck.  
  
Then, he felt someone behind him. There was a barely audible sound, a disturbance his brain couldn’t process--- but time and experience had honed his instincts. As he spun to face the darkness, he pulled an empty syringe from his pocket and threw his hand out in front of him in defence. So, the first time he saw Seunghyun, it was the over the knife Seunghyun had quietly put to his throat; over the faint glimmer of metal between them. They had drawn at the same time and hesitated. His syringe was empty, but only he knew that. They each had a weapon on the other.  
  
‘How did you find this door?’ Seunghyun asked.  
  
He looked calm for someone holding a knife. He looked calm for someone in the city, full stop. He looked like a man who had found himself on a deserted island and acclimated to the emptiness, only to be thrust back into the mire of civilization unexpectedly. Jiyong stumbled over his words, too surprised to give a coherent answer. What door? Who the fuck was he, and why did it take so long to hear him?  
  
‘I’ll cut your throat,’ Seunghyun warned, giving the knife an extra nudge.  
  
‘I wouldn’t,’ Jiyong blustered. ‘The syringe I have to your side? It’s no prize’.  
  
‘Oh?’  
  
‘Yeah. It will burn you up. One tiny prick and you’ll go up in flames’.  
  
Seunghyun hesitated.  
  
‘You’re the Firestarter?’  
  
Jiyong flinched at his early moniker.  
  
‘That’s me’.  
  
The blade wavered at Jiyong’s throat and then dropped away. Seunghyun relaxed and put his weapon away so Jiyong put his away unseen. Seunghyun had his own survival stories. It turned out Jiyong’s formula had saved him once. Jiyong had inadvertently killed someone who was on his way to kill Seunghyun. That was their introduction to one another.  
  
After that, Seunghyun pulled Jiyong into his world, literally; a small subterranean conclave hidden from the world above through junk technology he had reappropriated. Seunghyun had survived relatively unharmed and invisible for almost three years. It was hard to believe. In that time, Jiyong had escaped death a thousand times and killed dozens of people by necessity. Seunghyun was grateful for the accidental favour and offered him a place to hide. Sanctuary. After that, they just got along, in a way people didn’t really get along anymore. They became friends. It was a relief to not be alone anymore. Life was easier. They each had someone to watch their back. Jiyong started doing contract killings for money, so he could put food in their stomachs and Seunghyun figured out ways to keep them safe. He had hidden entrances to his subterranean space all over the city. Until Jiyong, one had never been discovered, and another never was. They could sleep with both eyes closed.  
  
For a while, they were safe. Love came eventually. It was nice to have a friend, but when their feelings grew, that was better. That was Jiyong’s first real reason to live. That was a reason to want more and to fight for something better. So, they did. Earth was toxic. It was slowly killing them, so they fought their way off by the skin of their teeth. They wanted more time together. Off-world, they learned the skills necessary to survive. They became criminals, and then hired guns, learning their trade as they went. They were good at it. They worked well together. They could anticipate each-others needs and thoughts. Love became so much more than love. In time, they became each-others lifeline. Sever the cord and they would both die.  
  
After a few years, they fell in with a group of mercenaries who were difficult or notoriously inept. Together, they have become a dysfunctional family, taking whatever dirty jobs need doing and splitting the profits between them. Profits which now provide them food to live, the occasional weekend on an asteroid with a bar and a brothel, and fuel for the ship but not much else. Paradise is far away. Seunghyun can joke about each job bringing them closer to the simulation Jiyong recurringly visits, but that’s all it is. A joke. He won’t be walking over lush green grass or kicking shells down a sidewalk. It’s a fantasy.

  
*

  
‘Whatever the job is,’ Jiyong says, on the ship. ‘I trust your decision’.  
  
‘I’m worried’.  
  
He turns his nose into the side of Seunghyun’s face and kisses him absently on the cheek.  
  
‘Why?’  
  
‘It didn’t come through the regular channels. It’s a government listing’.  
  
Jiyong pulls back in surprise. The jobs they take come from cartels, corporations and private individuals. The government rarely post offers of work down mercenary channels and when they do, there’s always a catch. Government listings are for desperate people and the walking dead.  
  
‘What’s the job?’  
  
‘There’s a planet a few weeks out. It was green-lit for a research habitat. The first scout ship went a few months back with scientists on board,’ Seunghyun says. ‘They were in communication all the way, but once they arrived, comms went dead. A second ship was sent to figure out what happened to the first. Same story. The crew of the second sent an all-clear from planetary orbit and then all communications ceased’.  
  
‘Let me guess, they’re advertising for a third suicide party?’ Jiyong proffers. ‘They don’t want to lose another of their own ships so they’re outsourcing’.  
  
‘Bingo’.  
  
‘And you’re thinking about taking the job. Why?’  
  
‘It’s a lot of money. More money than we earn in a year. Two strikes though,’ he shrugs. ‘Those are bad odds’.  
  
‘They have no idea what’s going on?’  
  
‘No. It could be anything. The ships might have been destroyed. Maybe there are atmospheric anomalies the initial readings didn’t show. Maybe the ships were boarded and seized by junkers for scrap. The crews could have made it onto the surface and been killed by someone, or disease even, bacterium we don’t even know about. This is an uncharted planet. Everything known about it comes from a single drone sweep two years ago’.  
  
‘So we find out what happened to the crews?’  
  
‘And return some proof of discovery’.  
  
‘Like a corpse or an air freshener from the pilot’s seat?’  
  
‘Something like that’.  
  
‘Sounds dangerous,’ Jiyong says. ‘What do you think happened?’  
  
‘I don’t know,’ Seunghyun answers soberly. ‘Maybe the planet is utopian and they’re all busy on the surface enjoying their good fortune. Maybe they found something and want it for themselves’.  
  
‘Maybe they’re all dead and we’ll die too’.  
  
‘Maybe’.  
  
Jiyong smiles gravely but puts his apprehension aside. He thinks about all the time they could spend alone together with the money from a job like this. They wouldn’t have to go to a shit-stinking outpost, they could holiday like civilians. They could stay somewhere comfortable and spend a few fleeting months in domesticity. Maybe one government job could lead to another. He’d sell his soul for a few big pay-checks. Maybe Paradise is out of reach, but aren’t there other places? Places better than an old ship travelling from disaster to disaster for a pittance?  
  
'And if we stumble into a conspiracy or see something we shouldn't? You trust the government to let us go?' Jiyong asks, rationally. 'There are a lot of ways this can go sideways. There's a reason we don't take government listings'.  
  
Truthfully, he enjoys this life. They are good at their jobs and the constant threat of death and danger keeps them on their toes, and dependent on one another. It works. But their holiday's work too. Seunghyun, usually straight-laced, unfurls and becomes placid and warm. They get to experience gentleness in an otherwise rough universe. To have that for the rest of their lives? What simulation could best it.  
  
'I don't know,' Seunghyun answers. 'I agree, there's a lot at stake'.  
  
'And a lot to gain'.  
  
‘So what do you think?’ Seunghyun asks, fully prepared to agree with whatever answer he’s given. The responsibility gives Jiyong pause, but in his heart, he has dreams that cost money.  
  
‘Do it,’ he says, making the choice for them both. ‘Take the job. Let’s go earn ourselves a holiday’.


	2. Act of God

 

  
‘Well, they’re not here’.  
  
Jiyong rolls his eyes and lets Guo announce the obvious. Arriving in orbit twelve hours ago, there has been no trace of either missing ship on long or short-range scanners. A final sweep reveals the extent of what is missing. There is no sign anyone was ever here.  
  
‘There’s no debris,’ Jiyong says plainly.  
  
‘And no distress signal coming from planet’.  
  
Engine signatures dissipate within days. If either ship left orbit, there is no way to track them. They are weeks too late. The mystery element of the job is now galvanised and completely unwelcome. Jiyong knew the likelihood of finding nothing was high, but he wilts at the first road block. He has become, by necessity, a man of action. The three-week journey here has stretched his patience to its limits. Not an engineer or a pilot, his role on this job is to fight if necessary and not much else. Meaning, every second he is on the ship is a waste of time and energy.  
  
With the missing vessels still missing, the next phase of the plan is to sit tight for forty-eight hours and smoke out any unseen threats. If the two government ships were taken or boarded, it would have happened within 48 hours of their arrival here. The plan now, is to wait for a potential attack. The thought of inaction harangues him.  
  
The bridge door opens behind him with a pneumatic hiss and Jiyong knows it’s Seunghyun without looking. He is the only one missing. For an hour, the crew have been on the bridge, minus Wake, the engineer, each manning a console, watching for signs of debris or anything out of the ordinary. Seunghyun has been conspicuously absent.  
  
‘If they landed without communications,’ he says, joining the group, ‘their distress signal could be offline. They might still be alive’.  
  
Jiyong nudges him off, irritated, when he stops beside him, shoulder to shoulder. Seunghyun has the relaxed posture of a man who has shirked his responsibilities and gotten away with it. Seunghyun tries to get his attention but Jiyong keeps his eyes firmly on Guo, their navigator. She has her feet up on the console.  
  
‘If they landed without main power, they’re dead,’ she answers simply. ‘They’ve been missing for weeks. Back up life support lasts days not weeks’.  
  
‘Maybe they fixed it,’ Seunghyun suggests.  
  
‘Maybe not’.  
  
‘Maybe there’s interference. They could be down there and we can’t detect them’.  
  
‘There’s nothing unusual that I’m reading,’ Guo slaps the console. ‘It’s standard atmosphere for a psychroplanet. There’s nothing I can see that would hinder our equipment’.  
  
‘It’s still worth going down for a look’.  
  
There’s a wave of anticipatory silence, like a feedback loop running from Seunghyun back to Guo, who raises her brows in a bemused gesture.  
  
‘No shit,’ she answers. ‘That’s the job’ _._  
  
Jiyong smirks, irritated enough by Seunghyun’s lateness that the enemy of my enemy and so forth. None of them were eager for a three-week journey to the frontier, let alone on a government listing, but money talks and this job promises its share. The take on this one is good enough to justify a seven-way split. Jiyong lets his mind wander, but only for a second, imagining the kind of vacation he could take with that kind of money. Irritated with Seunghyun, he tries to imagine a solo trip promising peace and quiet. Meditative isolation. He’s disgruntled to realise he can’t picture it. Seunghyun is never not there.  
  
Before leaving the system, their ship was outfitted with an engine upgrade courtesy of the government. Without it, a journey from the core planets would have taken several months. If the job doesn’t pan out, they are all in unspoken agreement that the new engine won’t be returned. The new drive is cutting edge technology; only government ships and cartels have them. If they can find a buyer when this is all said and done, they can each retire for _years_ off the profits.  
  
Jiyong pulls up a nearby seat and sits down, kicking his feet up on the edge of the console in imitation of Guo. He keeps his back to Seunghyun. The others parry around looping speculations, repeating themselves until the only obvious solution to the present mystery remains. Okafor claps his hands together in anticipation, saying something they each already know.    
  
‘We’re going down!'  
  
He taps the controls and the viewscreen flickers. Readouts are replaced by an image of the planet below. White light fills the room. The planet looks deflated on screen, like the sunken cheek of a corpse. Okafor dims the viewer so it’s less bright and they all take a moment to have a second look. It will be hard going on the surface if they need to leave the ship. The planet is a nightmare. There are solar winds strong enough to tear habitats apart. The magnetic field is weak. Most of the upper atmosphere has been stripped away.  
  
After forty-eight hours, if they haven’t lured any potential attackers into the open, they’ll enter the atmosphere and try to land. Maybe the missing ships are down there somewhere. It seems unlikely, but the thought of searching makes Jiyong cringe despite his desperation to stretch his legs. He shivers. He hates the cold, more so solar winds. Even through a tac suit, the sound passes your ear like a ghoul howling in the dark. It's unsettling.  
  
The new kid, Rani, nods in his direction.  
  
‘You don’t like the cold?’  
  
Jiyong grimaces at the intrusion. Zelenetsky hired the kid the day before they left on their three-week journey. Recruited for dubious medical and engineering qualifications, he hasn’t shown himself to be useful at either. He has spent the past three weeks jumping from person to person, imprinting on each of them like a newborn, asking questions with the wide-eyed sincerity of a first lifer. Jiyong can tell by the way he talks that he is brand new to space. He has an outpost accent, thick and constrained. He hasn’t picked up the inflections or the language-blending the rest of them have. He comes from a settled colony, Jiyong can tell, which means his papers were faked. His qualifications were faked. That makes Jiyong uneasy. Settled colonies are for life, it’s part of the bargain. It is part of the deal people make in exchange for moderate safety and stability. If you leave a settled colony, you’re out. You can’t go back.  
  
Jiyong eyes Rani with disdain. He is too young to have been forced out for any serious crime, which means he left voluntarily, because he’s bored and craves adventure. He’s the worst kind of moron, which makes him dangerous. Jiyong has kept his opinions and observations to himself. Better not to rock the boat at the beginning of a trip. Now, he’s biding his time.  
  
‘Not particularly,’ Jiyong answers him.  
  
‘ _Fire and Brimstone_ over here died on his last job,’ Okafor intercedes, gesturing towards Jiyong. ‘Bullet hole in his helmet. He didn’t patch it. The atmosphere leaked in and he fucking froze to death’. He says it with a laugh, and Jiyong answers through grit teeth.  
  
_‘Barely’._  
  
For all the years they have been a makeshift crew, people have died and been revived, or died and died for good, but Zelenetsky and Okafor have been present since the beginning. They have survived and outlasted. Partially, because they have avoided overt risk. Jiyong and Seunghyun take the majority for a higher cut. While not exactly friends, they know how to co-exist.  
  
Rani’s eyes widen, and he takes a step closer, face illuminated.  
  
‘How did they bring you back?’ he asks. ‘How long were you dead? Did you have residual tissue damage? Did it heal?’  
  
‘What’s with the twenty questions?’ Okafor asks. ‘Are you a student?’  
  
‘I’m interested in what happens to people after they come back,’ he answers, not missing a beat. ‘How frozen _were_ you? When the human body is exposed to subzero conditions, the oxygen in your haemoglobin binds too tightly. Tissues freeze and die. How do you revive dead tissue? That’s impossible, surely’.  
  
Jiyong winces. That nobody else is paying heed to the kid’s obvious inexperience rankles him. Any doctor on a ship knows exactly what happens to a frozen body. Likewise, any doctor worth anything knows how the revival machines work and when they don't. Every medical training facility has one. That’s where theirs came from. They stole it.  
  
‘I was only dead for a minute,’ Jiyong answers. ‘The damage was reversible. I wasn’t frozen, just _chilled_. A week of rehab. It was nothing’.  
  
Of his six deaths, it was the least traumatic, and the one he is least willing to talk about. It was too much like going to sleep. With four of them surrounded in a firefight, he had time to patch the hole in his helmet, but only if he put down his gun and if he did that, there would have been no one left to revive him. He had to even out the odds to increase his own, so he kept shooting until he couldn’t anymore. He improved the odds. Then, the oxygen thinned. Confusion settled. He sank to his knees, tired and heavy, like slipping in or perhaps out of a dream. It was quick and easy, like falling asleep. He simply lay down, his helmet crunching in the sand, and closed his eyes. Like that, he was dead and that death always reeked of failure. He should have had more to give. One more minute. One more step.  
  
‘How did someone get to you so quickly?’ Rani asks. ‘Three minutes post-mortem, that’s all you get before the revival machines don’t work’.  
  
Jiyong pokes a lazy thumb back in Seunghyun’s direction.  
  
‘We keep an eye out’.  
  
‘Even in a firefight? The odds of you noticing someone go down, let alone getting to them fast enough for a revival--’  
  
‘We do okay,’ Jiyong answers, content to let that be it, but a zipper is undone behind him and he groans in answer to it.  
  
So proud of his invention, it isn’t enough to explain the science behind it, Seunghyun has to physically _exhibit_ his creation; Frankenstein revealing his monster. Jiyong reluctantly turns in his chair in time to see Seunghyun’s jacket hit the steel grating covering the floor. Seunghyun then pulls up his shirt, unabashed, to reveal his left pec. He taps on his subdermal heart rate monitor and his vitals appear beneath the skin in muted red. His pulse is steady. Most of them have the implant. It makes it easier in the field to check a person’s vitals. It helps to know how much time is left before revival is no longer an option. Seunghyun looks down and smiles, content at his own good health. He touches the skin below his heart rate monitor and similar numbers appear in blue.  
  
There is a pause and Jiyong counts the seconds before the audible gasp he expects emerges from this kid’s mouth.  
  
‘Wait,’ Rani asks, not letting him down. ‘What are _those_ numbers?’  
  
Jiyong wilts as all the eyes in the room turn and land on him. He has participated in this show several times already and he’s just about had enough. It grates on him to have his privacy invaded like this. Still, he plays his role in the entertainment. Seunghyun’s little invention has saved them both enough times. Jiyong lets him have his moment. How can he not? Avoiding eye contact with the kid, Jiyong stands up and lazily jumps on the spot a few times, holding the thin chain around his neck against his chest. With the increase in activity, the blue numbers on Seunghyun’s chest slowly rise. His own heart-rate reflected below Seunghyun’s.  
  
Rani looks from one to the other.  
  
_‘Wait---’_  
  
‘The big man over here is pretty handy with a tool,’ Zelenetsky says, pointing a pencil in Seunghyun’s direction, ‘and I don’t just mean _his’_ he says, pointing at Jiyong with a jerk-off motion. He laughs but the kid pays no attention.  
  
‘You have interconnected heart rate monitors? That’s _fascinating,’_ Rani says, rushing Seunghyun. ‘How did you do it? They work in real time? Is there a delay? What about distance? Who else has one? What happens when one of you dies?’  
  
‘There’s no delay,’ Seunghyun answers, enjoying the sudden admiration. ‘The second he dies, I know. It works within 2 kilometres, and nobody else has one. I made it for us, special’.  
  
‘And when one of you dies? Are you alerted?’  
  
‘With pain, near the heart’.  
  
‘Isn’t that a bit on the nose?’ Rani asks. ‘I mean, heartbreak, right? Poetic’.  
  
‘Just pain,’ Seunghyun shrugs. ‘In a melee, how could you see or hear it happen? With the adrenaline, potential injuries? You're not focussed. How can something pull your attention _immediately_?’  
  
‘Pain,’ Rani answers slowly.  
  
‘Fresh pain. Worse pain. The alert has to focus you in an instant,’ Seunghyun says, pinching his fingers together. ‘That’s what I designed it to do. When his monitor goes dead, it triggers pain in my intercostal nerves,’ he taps his chest. ‘It’s excruciating, but only lasts a moment. It works both ways. It’s enough to jolt us out of whatever we’re doing so we can find each other’.  
  
‘Wow’.  
  
‘Yeah, and the rest is none of your fucking business,’ Jiyong cuts in, suddenly embarrassed. He quickly steps between them and tugs Seunghyun’s shirt down. He picks the jacket up off the ground and pushes it into Seunghyun’s chest with a pleading look. They don’t know this kid. This lying, manipulative, colony-born dickhead. The less he knows about either of them, the better.  
  
‘I’m sorry—’ the kid begins, so close that Jiyong feels his breath on the side of his neck. He jolts sideways, irritated, and throws a hand out as if swatting a fly.  
  
‘Stop breathing down my fucking neck’.  
  
Rani pales and takes a few steps back. Zelenetsky and Okafor laugh and Guo minimises the window on the viewscreen. The planet shrinks into one corner, replaced by the blackness of space. She takes her opportunity to disperse the group.  
  
‘There’s nobody here and no trace of either missing ship. Like we agreed, we’ll sit in orbit for 48 hours and see what happens. Stay on alert. We’ll take shifts in here. Everyone else, fuck off for now. I’m sick of all of you’.

  
  
*

 

  
Jiyong trails up the short hall and Seunghyun falls into step beside him.  
  
‘What was that about?’  
  
‘I hate waiting’.  
  
‘The _kid,’_ Seunghyun clarifies.  
  
‘I know what you meant. He’s _annoying,_ ’ Jiyong enunciates, matching his tone. ‘There’s something off about him. You don’t think so?’  
  
Seunghyun shrugs, then hesitantly concedes.  
  
‘Okay, sure. He’s eager. And he does have the accent which makes me wonder what he’s doing here’.  
  
‘He’s fresh off a colony’.  
  
‘He can’t be. He has ship experience. Netsky vetted him’.  
  
‘Netsky is a drunk and came back with this kid after a three-day bender,’ Jiyong answers, stopping outside the hatchway leading to the crew quarters downstairs.  
  
‘So, what? You’re going to scare him every time he tries to talk to you?’  
  
‘I won’t talk to him at all,’ he answers. ‘And you shouldn’t either. We don’t know anything about him. You want to tell him our life story?’  
  
‘Lots of people have monitors. It wasn’t exactly top-secret information I was doling out’.  
  
‘You don’t think people knowing our monitors are connected could come back to bite us in the ass one day?’ Jiyong asks. ‘I don't want strangers knowing. It's invasive. I didn’t say anything before because I love you, and I love this thing you created, I do. And you deserve recognition for it, but it’s not just _your_ personal information. It’s mine too. It’s not a party trick’.  
  
Seunghyun raises his arms in disbelief, visibly frustrated.  
  
‘I didn’t know you felt that way,’ he says eventually.  
  
Jiyong frowns. Their interconnected monitors are a source of pride for Seunghyun, he should be allowed to enjoy the sporadic praise and admiration from showing them off. Still, Jiyong is wary. There are dangers in being too open.  
  
‘You used to be so private. What happened?’  
  
Seunghyun shrugs and puts his hands on his hips.  
  
‘Well, sometime after my 6 th year of killing people for money, I came out of my shell’.  
  
A smile tugs at the corner of Jiyong’s mouth, but he refuses to concede this little spat.  
  
‘Where were you anyway?’ he asks. ‘I was on the bridge for an hour listening to those dumbasses make spooky ghost noises every time we checked a box off the search grid’. He doesn’t have to say who those dumbasses were for Seunghyun to know. ‘You were supposed to be up there _with_ us’.  
  
‘I had some work to finish up’.  
  
‘What work?’ Jiyong asks. ‘You have the same job as me. You think I don’t know about your naps in the hydroponics room? That’s not work’.  
  
‘You’re cranky, so I’ll let it slide that you’re suggesting I’m an incompetent liar’.  
  
‘What work?’ Jiyong presses him. ‘How is it that you always have _work_ to finish up whenever shit needs doing, but _I_ never have any. It’s crazy,’ he says, gesturing blithely. ‘Whenever there’s a tedious job that needs doing, you’re nowhere to be found’.  
  
While not exactly wrong, Seunghyun’s disappearing acts don’t bother him as much as his accusatory tone suggests. He is surprised by the words coming out of his own mouth and regrets all of them. He is wound up, and not because of Seunghyun. He is just in the wrong place at the wrong time and not for the first time either. For the last few days, he has struggled to control his temper, creating issues out of trivial things. It’s not something he normally does and Seunghyun has borne the brunt of it.  
  
‘There are five consoles on the bridge,’ Seunghyun answers carefully. ‘There are seven of us. I would have only been looking over your shoulder. So, instead, I finished up a personal project, okay?’  
  
‘What project?’  
  
‘A simulation program I’ve been modifying for you. It was a gift, asshole, and a more productive use of my time today than being dead weight up here with the rest of you. There was nothing on our approach. We all knew we wouldn’t find anything’.  
  
Jiyong frowns deeper and shifts his weight, feeling like a prick.  
  
‘You made me something?’  
  
‘Yeah,’ Seunghyun answers, disgruntled. ‘I couldn’t alter your paradise demo but I cloned another simulation and tried to edit that so it was visually similar, with a house you could actually walk into. I took out all the monsters and gangbangs and put in a few lamps and half a dozen plants. That kind of thing’.  
  
Jiyong’s shoulders slump.  
  
‘You can do that? I didn’t know you could program sims'.  
  
‘I can’t, really. I’ve been reading up on it. Trial and error’.  
  
Seunghyun is a good tinkerer, self-taught. On Earth, he re-progranmed old holo-technology to disguise their hideaway. That he could edit or change a simulation shouldn't come as a surprise. That he would take the time though--- Jiyong’s bottom lip juts out of its own accord and he bridges the gap between them, placing a hand on the back of Seunghyun’s neck in apology. They are stomach to stomach almost.  
  
‘That’s--- really sweet of you’.  
  
He gets a light eye-roll in answer but Seunghyun doesn’t say anything, so Jiyong places his other hand on the back of his neck too, his fingers interlaced there.  
  
‘I’m sorry,’ he says quietly. ‘I’m sorry for what I said. I didn’t mean it. Not like that’.  
  
‘You’ve been attacking me all week’.  
  
‘I know,’ he says. ‘I don’t know why. I’m sorry’.  
  
‘I’ve been checking your monitor,’ Seunghyun answers, sliding a hand between them to press on Jiyong’s chest. Red numbers appear muted through this thin shirt. His heart rate reflects his anxiety. He can’t explain that. It is more than the usual wariness of being on a job. Since they began their approach to the planet, he has felt off. Agitated. Like something bad is going to happen. ‘Your stats have been going up and down for days’.  
  
Jiyong grimaces. The benefits of their linked monitors far outweigh the negatives, but sometimes he resents the lack of privacy.  
  
‘I have a bad feeling’.  
  
Seunghyun almost smiles but his face reassembles into something more serious.  
  
‘Yeah?’  
  
‘Yeah, and I don’t know _why’._  
  
‘We’re on a job. It’s wise to be wary’.  
  
‘It’s not that. We’ve been doing this a long time. I know how I feel. The hairs on the back of my neck are standing up. Something bad is going to happen. I feel it’. He squeezes the back of Seunghyun’s neck for emphasis.  
  
Seunghyun frowns and Jiyong tilts his head to one side, exasperated, wondering if the journey here has clouded his judgement. He has been bouncing off the walls, his patience ground down to nothing. Maybe this is cabin fever.  
  
‘You think I’m insane?’  
  
‘No,’ Seunghyun answers reluctantly. ‘I kind of feel the same. I didn’t want to say anything’.  
  
‘What do you think?’ Jiyong asks, knowing the answer already. The ache in his stomach flares into life. ‘You think one of us will die?’  
  
‘I have no reason to think so,’ Seunghyun answers unconvincingly. ‘There’s nothing here’.  
  
‘Isn’t that the problem?’ Jiyong asks. ‘Better an enemy you can see’.  
  
‘You think something happened to these scientists, then? You don’t think they landed or were— diverted?’  
  
‘Them and the people sent to find them? Both diverted? Without leaving a buoy or sending a message? Where would they go voluntarily without comms open? This planet is a scientist’s wet dream’.  
  
Jiyong read the files. Habitable psychroplanet’s are rare enough. The long sequence of events that have to occur at the formation of a system in order to produce a habitable planet? The conditions have to be perfect. The goldilocks zone around a star is infinitesimally small and in these zones are _all_ habitable planets. The planet they’re orbiting now is technically habitable, but there’s no logical goldilocks zone. Too far from the nearest star, the planet should be far colder than it is, life insupportable. There is no scientific basis for it. There’s no precedent. The scientists they’re looking for were supposed to land and turn their ship into a research station.  
  
‘So, something happened to them,’ Seunghyun concludes.  
  
‘Something that left no trace of them,’ Jiyong answers. ‘I don’t have any ideas, I just know that’s not a good thing. I want to _do_ something, I want to investigate, I want to figure this shit out and I can’t. Instead, we have to sit here for two days on our asses. I hate it’.  
  
Seunghyun lays a sympathetic hand on his shoulder and Jiyong closes his eyes. The hum of the ventilation system becomes meditative white noise. In his mind he visualises the journey here in reverse, moving away from this unexplored chunk of ice backwards through the system, past the hot white disc of the nearest star and a gas giant after that until he is rushing over the pinpricks of lesser bodies. Three weeks at top speed with their new government drive, they are further from home than he has ever been. He opens his eyes.  
  
‘If we believe the government, which I’m not saying we should,’ Jiyong says with resignation, ‘this region is totally uninhabited and unexplored. This would-be science outpost was a first step at colonisation. This is the frontier of the frontier. So, I have to ask. Who got here first? Who or what is out here?’  
  
‘I don’t know,’ Seunghyun answers honestly, ‘but I’m guessing we’ll find out’.  
  
‘Yeah. If it’s the last thing we _do’._  
  
Seunghyun slides his arms around him and Jiyong softens at the faint squeeze that says all is forgiven. He anticipates the next words out of Seunghyun’s mouth.  
  
‘You know what I always say. Everything in life is just for a while’.  
  
The sound of approaching footsteps echoes up the hall towards them. Jiyong gives Seunghyun a quick, discrete kiss before answering.  
  
‘Because eventually, we _die’._  
  
‘Maybe even this week!’ Seunghyun jests, turning him around. Jiyong smiles despite himself and heads down the hatchway with Seunghyun trailing behind.

  
* * *  


While Seunghyun takes a shower, blasted in a claustrophobic stall with frigid air, Jiyong ignores his plea not to look at the simulation he's been tinkering with. Jiyong slips the nodes onto his temples. He just needs a peek, if he doesn’t look, it will drive him insane, wondering. Seunghyun said it was finished but that he was saving it for a particular time, but when, and why? He activates it. _Just one little look---_  
  
As the sterile surrounds of his bunk peel away, replaced by the landscape of a familiar simulation, Jiyong marvels at the newness of it; of a program stripped bare. Similar but dissimilar. The environment lacks the realism of the Paradise demo, and Jiyong quickly recognises bits and pieces. It is an amalgamation of two sims from their library, both morally devoid sexcapades, except this world Seunghyun has created for him isn’t peopled. There are no spitting cowboys or topless women, no distant sounds of gunfire. There is the faint sound of a breeze and what might be a beach some way off. It’s meditative. It’s nice. It must have taken a lot of work to change even this much.  
  
He wants to savour every detail but he doesn’t have time. He moves through the simulation quickly, up what used to be the main street of an old western style town, replaced now with a paved road and steel framed houses like they have on Paradise, with a preponderance of glass through which he sees the shadows of furniture through thin curtains.  
  
He wonders which of the houses Seunghyun made enterable, but turns a corner and sees what is almost an exact replica of _the_ house on Paradise a few metres ahead of him. It is beautifully done, more detailed and exacting than the rest of the neighbourhood. Seunghyun has done most of the work here, from the swing in the tree at the side of the house, to the flowers out the front, the grass, the oranges. All of it. It is a perfect imitation.  
  
Jiyong stops in front of the house, unable for a while to actually go any further. He looks upon the house and soaks it in. He marvels at it; the enjoyment of getting to this stage in the simulation without being propelled along an unstoppable narrative, without a tour guide rehearsing a sales pitch, without holographic people nudging him or suffocating him. He can stand here as long as he wants and the world won’t disappear around him. This alone would have been enough. All he ever wanted from the Paradise demo was more time. Seunghyun has done that for him, unprompted, in secret. He has learned whole new skills to make it happen.  
  
In the real world, the din from the shower ceases and Jiyong knows he only has another minute or two before Seunghyun will catch him in the act. He asked him not to try the simulation but he couldn’t resist.  
  
He propels himself forward, throwing open the front door with baited breath, but he is dumbstruck. Inside, it is dark. Beside him there is a small table but he can’t progress further. There is a lock in the simulation—there is more, an entire house to explore and he can’t see it. Seunghyun has disallowed it. Jiyong almost trembles with frustration at this insatiable taste marred by a barrier, but his eyes are drawn back to the table by his side. There is a book on it and nothing else. He turns it onto its front and sighs.  
  
He has this book in the real world. It is sitting on a shelf in their shared bunk. He has held onto it for a decade, since he first found it on the day they left Earth. It is _Paradise Lost_ in a language he doesn’t understand but for a single line translated into an older-style Korean by its previous owner on the inside cover. _“So dear I love him, that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life.”_

An old, old book. Language had changed so much in the intervening years, Milton’s words were archaic, but the first time Jiyong read them he quivered. They struck his soul. Nothing had ever broached the gap of time so far to reach him. Nothing had ever seemed as simple or as true. Its context didn’t matter. He didn’t find a translation of the book until years later but he felt the books previous owner had extracted its most prescient line for him already.  
  
He opens the book and the familiar writing he knows by heart is exactly where it should be. He traces the characters with his fingers, mouthing the words as he moves along them. It is a perfect replica of the real thing. He looks back to the impenetrable darkness and wonders what else Seunghyun has done in here, what objects of importance he has implanted in this dream home; how many of them are his own?  
  
Jiyong pulls the nodes from his head and the simulation evaporates around him. He puts them back in their box and slips quietly out the door before Seunghyun emerges from the bathroom.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

He rolls the back of his head across a cold pipe jutting out from the wall, his foot lazily tapping the corner of the revival machine. He exhales a shaky smoke ring and watches it drift into the air above, dissolving into loose tendrils before disappearing through the small vent in the ceiling. One of the few rooms on the ship that has fully functioning air scrubbers, it’s small and cold, but clean and silent. Most importantly, it is perpetually empty. Nobody on the ship has a sufficiently morbid personality to want to spend their free time staring at a glorified coffin. He comes here for privacy and to unwind, but part of him likes to sit and follow the tubes and wires and connections that have kept the machine running for all the years they’ve had it. It humbles him. It helps him to prepare.  
  
In this machine alone, he has seen Seunghyun’s naked body beneath the glass a dozen times. The machine is wearing down, the way their bodies are wearing down. He knows there won’t be many more vigils in here. The day is going to come when he’ll close that lid over Seunghyun’s lifeless body and watch in agony as the machine fails. Or, maybe it will happen the other way around. He is only two deaths behind Seunghyun and he feels the aches more with each revival; the nausea and the dizziness and the knowledge each time that with each round in the machine, important pieces of him get left behind.  
  
He thinks about Seunghyun and his heart aches. Maybe he is getting sentimental as he ages, but it’s getting harder to take each job, harder to focus, harder not to worry and agonise over everything that might go wrong. He doesn’t want to die. More than that, he doesn’t want Seunghyun to die like he has done so many times before but worse. Die for good. Die _forever._  
  
Jiyong holds his left palm open on his lap and traces the black lines on the inside of his ring finger. One line for each of Seunghyun’s deaths. A morbid reminder between them. He is running out of room. He isn’t superstitious but there is only room comfortably for one more line, the way they have them spaced. Part of him fears some unseen magic in this—that when Seunghyun runs out of space on his finger, he’ll run out of luck in real life.  
  
He rubs his eyes and shakes his head. The touching sentimentality of Seunghyun’s modified simulation wreaks havoc on his courage. He needs to sit here for a while and breathe, and readjust to the real world. To not think about beautiful homes in imaginary worlds. They have a job to do. He has to stay clear headed.  
  
He flicks ash into a small tin plate in his lap and looks over at the steel door as it slowly creaks open. Rani’s face appears in the gap, lighting up in acknowledgement of company. Jiyong shakes his head and points a finger of warning.  
  
‘No. Get out’.  
  
Rani persists, unperturbed. He steps into the small room and closes the heavy door behind him, visibly brightened by Jiyong’s presence on the floor.  
  
‘Are you deaf?’ Jiyong asks wearily.  
  
Rani shakes his head and transfers his arms here and there like an awkward animal, until they are folded over his chest. He has something to say but can’t say it. He has to work up to it, fidgeting like there is someone turning a crank, winding him up.  
  
‘You know, you’re not like I expected,’ he ultimately says. ‘People talk about you. You’re like folklore or something. When I heard you were on the ship, I expected someone different. Bigger maybe, more rugged’.  
  
Jiyong rolls his eyes, already exasperated, and takes another drag of his cigarette.  
  
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you’.  
  
‘That’s okay,’ Rani answers, oblivious. Jiyong bristles as the kid crouches down, sliding into a seated position against the wall beside him. Their thighs are almost touching. ‘I figured half of those stories for bullshit. This is cool though,’ he says, tapping the dragon sewn onto Jiyong’s shirt shoulder. ‘Propaganda works’.  
  
Jiyong shuffles over to reintroduce some space between them and takes a drag of his cigarette, letting smoke filter out of his mouth as he speaks. If he could just make each drag last longer, stretch it out impossibly far to negate the need for conversation---  
  
‘Propaganda?’  
  
‘The myth-making,’ Rani says. ‘I once heard you burned an entire military unit alive, single handed, like a dragon swooping down from the heavens to obliterate a village,’ He gestures with his hands. ‘Mythic stuff. Kids think you shoot fire out of your hands. A lot of people out there are afraid of you’.  
  
Jiyong shakes his head and closes his eyes. In a vain attempt at actualisation, he hopes closing his eyes will make this kid disappear. Out of sight, out of mind.    
  
‘No-one talks about you having a _boyfriend_ ,’ Rani says obtrusively. His words crack the fragile veneer of Jiyong’s peace. ‘I suppose that ruins the mystique. G-Dragon is a violent folk hero, like a pirate from the old days. You live by your own terms and do what needs to be done, no matter the cost.’ He slams an emphatic fist into his open palm. ‘People like those stories, even if they’re just as likely to be a victim. People never see themselves that way though. You kill people and the masses cheer, even though you’d just as quickly kill one of them. It’s kind of funny’.  
  
‘I kill people for money,’ Jiyong retorts, ‘or in self-defence. I don’t do it for fun’.  
  
‘Sure,’ Rani answers. ‘It doesn’t really matter. I just meant if people knew you had a partner, the stories would necessarily change. A hired gun from a nightmare who sets people on fire and then goes home to his boyfriend? It’s not so scary. Seunghyun is pretty nice too. And your monitors? That’s wild. I wish people knew about them. It’s kind of roman—'  
  
Jiyong grinds his teeth and takes a measured breath, feeling irritation swell every cell in his body. He puts his cigarette out and gestures to the door emphatically, cutting him off.  
  
‘Get out. I’ve had deaths less painful than this. There are several rooms on this ship. Find another one’.  
  
Rani wilts and Jiyong allows himself to hope this simple declaration is enough for him to leave. He has managed to avoid their being alone together for the entire three-week journey here. The kid is a liar and an effectual stowaway and Jiyong hasn’t decided yet what to do with that information or what it could mean. Still, to hear inane shit about his personal life? He can’t do it.  
  
‘What’s your problem?’ Rani asks instead of removing himself. ‘Every time I come near you, you tell me to fuck off’.  
  
‘And yet you don’t?’  
  
‘I haven’t done anything’.  
  
‘That’s the point,’ Jiyong answers. ‘You’re just a kid. You haven’t done _anything_. Places on this ship are supposed to be earned. You haven’t. For Christs sake, you’re a _first lifer’._

‘So what?’ Rani asks angrily. ‘Everybody has to start somewhere. Maybe you’ve died so many times because you’re fucking dumb’.  
  
Jiyong feels a swell of anger at this barb and responds without being fully conscious of it. He shows his cards, so desperate to end this conversation, he would take a confrontation, even a violent one, in exchange.  
  
‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ he answers sardonically. ‘Here’s what I _do_ know. You boarded this ship with fake papers. Two years of transport? Bullshit. You’re fresh out of the soil, I can smell it on you. You just left a colony’.  
  
Rani pales and Jiyong knows his intuition was right. Since the second he laid eyes on the kid, he could smell his newness. His papers said he was 24 with two-years of transport ship experience. Netsky was supposed to vet him, but he’s a career drunk who hasn’t done a good job of anything since he fell out of his mother and landed on a soft surface. Jiyong knew better than to trust him on this.  
  
‘How do you know that?’  
  
‘Everything about you is new,’ Jiyong answers. ‘You’re ignorant. You’ve been tailing people this whole trip, trying to suck up information. Maybe you have some book knowledge, but nothing practical’.  
  
Rani frowns.  
  
‘Your supposed Engineering qualifications?’ Jiyong asks.  
  
‘I have some of those. I worked on the generators in my colony, and I fixed stuff when It broke. I was a handy’.  
  
‘You were a colony handy?’ Jiyong asks, laughing. ‘That’s your experience? No ships?’  
  
‘No’.  
  
‘So you’re fucking useless?’  
  
‘I can _do_ things’.  
  
‘No, you can’t. You have no idea what you’ve signed up for. How old are you?’  
  
‘24’.  
  
‘Bullshit,’ Jiyong says. ‘How old?’  
  
’19 in two weeks’.  
  
‘Jesus Christ. Eighteen, born on a settled colony, with a _job,_ and you left to be a mercenary? Have you ever killed somebody? Have you even been in a fight? Broken a bone? Anything?’  
  
Rani says nothing.  
  
‘I could kick you out the fucking airlock right now,’ Jiyong says angrily.  
  
‘I can help on this job, I’m a fast learner’.  
  
Jiyong grinds his teeth in lieu of an answer. He pulls another cigarette out of the pack and lights it, biding his time, trying to swallow down his anger and bitterness, and the dense layers of disdain roiling beneath the surface.  
  
‘What was it, exactly? Life in the colony was too boring? You wanted some adventure? To be a mercenary?’  
  
‘It was the only job going,’ Rani answers, rattled. ‘Zelenetsky was asking around in a bar and I thought---'  
  
‘You’ve put everybody on the ship at risk,’ Jiyong cuts in. ‘You know that? Just by being here. You’ve taken the place of someone who could have been useful to us. We need extra hands. We need someone with a medical background who can fix things in a pinch. You’ve taken that person off our ship’.  
  
Rani lowers his eyes.  
  
‘Government jobs are high-risk,’ Jiyong continues. ‘Do you understand that? The casualty rate on these jobs are like 75%. They need good people. You’re not good people’.  
  
‘You don’t know that’.  
  
‘You’re a first lifer,’ Jiyong answers. ‘That’s enough. You can’t do your job properly because you’re not afraid. After you’ve died the first time, you’re more careful the next. It’s a benefit’.  
  
‘That’s pretty dramatic,’ Rani says, finding some confidence. ‘If you can do it, I can do it. Besides, the machine makes all the difference’. He gestures towards the machinery at their feet. ‘What’s the big deal about dying if you can be brought back? Who cares!’  
  
Jiyong laughs earnestly and takes a long drag of his cigarette.  
  
'Oh, death is going to greet you like a warm hug on a cold day’.  
  
‘Someone will bring me back’.  
  
‘No. Probably not’.  
  
Jiyong doesn’t tell him that when one of them dies, the chances of more than one dying grows. It happens, but there is only one machine. There have been times when the call for who to save was easy, and others not. Once, with a mostly different crew bar Okafor and Zelenetsky, he died along with the pilot. To the others, the pilot took precedence. His life was more important. Seunghyun disagreed. He had to drag Jiyong’s body to the revival machine with his gun trained on their own crew, locking the door behind them. He had to make that call.    
  
‘I’ll have a good death either way,’ Rani says, jutting his chin out with bravado.  
  
Jiyong takes another drag of his cigarette and crosses his ankles.  
  
‘There’s no such thing as a good death’.  
  
‘The revival machines have changed everything,’ Rani says knowingly. ‘We didn’t even have one on our colony’.  
  
‘What have they changed?’ Jiyong asks emphatically. ‘We’ve all died and seen there’s nothing on the other side. When you die the first time and wake up new, you don’t think you’re invincible after that. You become _more_ afraid because the first time you die you don’t see it coming. Until you die the first time, you can’t even _comprehend_ death. You don’t even think you _can_ die. You think, somehow, you’re the exception to the rule. Then you get shot, or stabbed, or frozen or some other undignified defeat and it’s so so easy. You wake up with the knowledge that you’re not special and you never were. You’re exceptionally fragile. You can and _will_ die and there’s nothing after this but nonexistence. This is it,’ Jiyong says, gesturing around.  
  
Rani keeps his jaw squared but as the words sink in, he wilts a little and some of his bravado melts away. He’s just a kid, Jiyong thinks, and he’s going to die a kid.  
  
‘Is that why you have a partner?’ Rani asks suddenly. ‘Seunghyun is a consolation prize?’  
  
‘Maybe,’ Jiyong shrugs. ‘What’s wrong with that? You have to scrape out happiness where you can find it’.  
  
‘That’s not something I’d expect a hitman to say’.  
  
‘A hitman?’ Jiyong asks, unused to the title. ‘Look, when you love somebody? When you kiss them? Fuck them? It’s a band-aid. It smothers the eternal dread and fear and panic that comes from living on a knife edge. For those little pockets of time, everything is okay. That’s priceless’.  
  
‘How long have you been together?’  
  
‘A long time. Over ten years’.  
  
‘What happens when one of you dies?’  
  
‘We’ve already died’.  
  
‘I mean for good?’  
  
Jiyong slumps a little, his cigarette halted between his lap and his mouth, just for a moment.  
  
‘If he dies before me, I’ll follow suit’.  
  
‘You would die? On purpose?’  
  
‘I can’t do this without him,’ Jiyong gestures around him. ‘I wouldn’t want to. Life before him was unliveable. My time is finite anyway. I’ll be dead at forty. If I go a little sooner, where’s the loss?’  
  
Rani pales and Jiyong shrugs. Part of him recoils at the thought of killing himself. Some latent and underdeveloped strain of optimism in the back of his brain tells him he’d recover in time, that he could make a life for himself without Seunghyun, but experience has proven otherwise. Milton knew. Only one of Seunghyun’s deaths seemed inescapable, infinite, irreversible, but it _was_ an education. With that one nightmarish death, Jiyong knew for certain that his life would only ever be as long as Seunghyun’s. When Seunghyun died, and there was no hope, he felt the metaphorical life-support go. The universe around him broke apart.  
  
Against his personal credo and against his better judgement, Jiyong reveals something personal to this stupid kid, a closely guarded secret. He tries to discourage him. To destroy his naive bravado. He tells a story that even Seunghyun doesn’t know, not fully.  
  
‘Three years ago, Seunghyun and I took this job,’ he begins. He keeps his eyes trained on the revival machine. ‘We didn’t anticipate any problems, it was a simple smash and grab for the two of us. A low security lab with one or two underpaid guards who wouldn’t fight back and half a dozen scientists. That was what we were told to expect. But, it didn’t turn out that way. We were ambushed’.  
  
Rani shuffles closer, overly keen.  
  
‘In hindsight,’ Jiyong continues, ‘The military were probably behind it. Maybe they wanted to test their defences, or their hired guns. It was all a test. Seunghyun and I were disposable. It happens. When we got to the lab, on this dusty little rock, there were at least twenty fully armed military personnel waiting for us. We walked into a firefight. We took a few of them down, but Seunghyun got shot. A single shot to the leg but it nicked an artery,’ Jiyong says. ‘In spite of your ignorance, I’m sure you know how quickly you die when that happens’.  
  
‘Yeah,’ Rani answers, subdued.  
  
‘His only chance was the revival machine back on the ship and that was 300 metres behind us on foot. You can’t park outside the front door when you’re about to break and enter. So, 300 metres,’ Jiyong reiterates, ‘with fifteen to twenty guns on our tail. Seunghyun couldn’t walk. He could barely talk, he was losing blood so quickly. There was no hope’.  
  
‘What happened?’  
  
‘I tried anyway,’ he shrugs. ‘I grabbed the back of his vest and I dragged his body back as fast as I could. Every inch of dirt we covered was streaked with blood. I was counting down the seconds in my head, calculating how much time I had left to save him. Three minutes post-mortem. That’s all we get. I didn’t _have_ three minutes to get him into that machine and even if I did, there were a dozen military personnel right behind us’.  
  
‘He was going to die’.  
  
Jiyong gives him a pointed look.  
  
‘Yeah. _Die_ die. He knew, and I knew’.  
  
‘But he didn’t die’.  
  
Jiyong frowns in lieu of confirmation.  
  
‘I dragged him 250 metres, almost all the way back to the ship, without a single bullet being fired in our direction. I covered a lot of ground quickly’.  
  
‘But you were being pursued? They weren’t shooting at you?’  
  
Jiyong tenses and his eyes close. Thinking about it takes him back. He can almost feel the heat again, the sweat running down his face. He can taste the dust in his mouth making a film over his teeth. That planet had a breathable atmosphere so they didn’t suit up fully. It was an easy job with breathable air so they travelled light. Tac vests and a holster. Simple. It made them lighter. It made Seunghyun’s body lighter too.  
  
‘They thought it was funny,’ Jiyong answers vacantly, still seeing the dust kicked up by 20 pairs of boots. ‘They knew Seunghyun was a goner. They knew they were going to kill me before I made it back to the ship, but I was trying anyway. It was funny, the futility of it. They lowered their weapons and followed us. The whole time I was dragging Seunghyun back to the ship, they were close behind, laughing and jeering’.  
  
Jiyong looks down into his lap and scratches the knee of his pants with his cigarette hand. A nervous tic. Stress wells inside him. His fingers ache.  
  
‘Seunghyun tells me he doesn’t remember that, but I know he does,’ he says quietly. ‘The last thing he would have seen and heard in this life was a wall of armed men, laughing and jeering at his pain. They made jokes of his death. When he woke up a few weeks later, he pretended he couldn’t remember anything from that day, but he could. That was his worst one. It scarred him. Even after he was well, we didn’t take another job together for months. I had to work in secret to keep us afloat’.  
  
‘But how did you both get out of it?’  
  
‘Luck,’ Jiyong answers vacantly. ‘I always drop weapons on our way out, in case we have to make a fast retreat under fire. That day, I dropped some supplies behind a rock I’d marked. I was so focussed on getting Seunghyun back, I almost missed it,’ Jiyong says. ‘But then Seunghyun died. I felt it. This sharp pain right above my heart.’  
  
‘Your monitors,’ Rani says quietly, recalling Seunghyun’s earlier demonstration.  
  
‘Yeah,’ Jiyong answers. ‘When he died, I dropped his body and there was the rock. It was right beside me. My stash. The extra gun. The bottle’.  
  
‘Bottle?’  
  
Jiyong taps the embroidered dragon on the shoulder of his shirt, unemotionally.  
  
‘The nameless stuff that made me famous,’ he says quietly. ‘I designed the bottles to look like alcohol, to disarm people. Despite my moniker, I don’t use the stuff very often. I don’t know why I took some with me that day. I guess the job seemed too good to be true. Too easy. I wanted to hedge my bets. Once Seunghyun was dead, I knew I only had three minutes to get him in the machine before it was too late to revive him’.  
  
‘What did you do?’ Rani asks, rapt.  
  
‘I grabbed the bottle and I pretended to take a swig. A defeated man. They all laughed at me, like I was insane. I was the most pitiful thing they’d ever seen. Like an animal who doesn’t realise it’s in the crosshairs. They were practically getting off on my grandiose gesture of grief,’ Jiyong says resentfully. ‘I held the bottle at my side, stumbled over to the group of them and I sank to my knees in front of them. I cried. I _begged_ for Seunghyun’s life’.  
  
‘What happened?’  
  
‘I got kicked in the head. My nose was broken. They spat on me’.  
  
‘Oh’.  
  
‘I thought,’ Jiyong says, pushing one fingernail beneath another in remembrance, ‘I wouldn’t have the time. There wasn’t enough time for me to drag Seunghyun’s body the last thirty metres onto the ship, down the hall and into that machine in time. My heart beat so hard in my chest it hurt me. It was painful. It was so loud in my ears. Every second ticked by like a kick to my spine. Seunghyun was dead, and I was dead, because even if I killed half of those men, I would never get away. That was the first time I knew I was going to die and not wake up again, and with Seunghyun gone I didn’t care’.  
  
‘What happened next?’  
  
‘I wanted revenge. I had nothing to stay alive for except making them pay for what they had done. I wanted to kill as many of them as I could, so I got back on my feet, half blind from the pain in my face, and I popped the lid off that bottle. One quick flick is all it took,’ he says, gesturing in an arching motion in front of him. ‘I only needed a few drops to land on the ones in front. Then, when they were jeering and confused, thinking I threw whiskey on them, I pulled the gun from my holster and let off a full clip before they knew what happened’.  
  
‘And—’  
  
‘And all it takes is an opening, you know. All it takes is a drop of blood,’ Jiyong says of his creation, of the formula that saw him branded the _firestarter_. ‘If there’s an open wound or a drop touches blood on the skin, that’s just as good. It works like a trail of gunpowder. A group of them went up in flames immediately. With all of them grouped together, the heat was blinding. It singed the hairs on my face. The ones who weren’t lit up hit the ground, confused. I took my chance, and I ran. I grabbed one of Seunghyun’s wrists and I dragged his body onto that ship as fast as I could, knowing I was already too late’.  
  
‘But you weren’t’.  
  
‘By a second’.  
  
‘Literally?’  
  
‘I doubt anyone has ever come so close and pulled it off. I closed the bulkhead door and ran. I got him into the machine. All the while, the men left alive outside had regrouped and were trying to get in, so I turned that machine on and left him there. I had to get the ship off the ground and away. It was ten minutes before we were clear and I could put the ship on autopilot. Ten full minutes, assuming he was dead’.  
  
‘But he wasn’t. You saved his life’.  
  
‘Barely. The machine couldn’t do enough to save him. It could repair his artery and keep his brain alive and his heart pumping with that saline solution crap, but he wouldn’t make it to the nearest medical facility. He had lost too much blood. Even in half-stasis, his organs wouldn’t have survived the trip’.  
  
‘What did you do?’  
  
‘We were three days away from medical help. I did what I had to. I made alterations to the machine. Once i replaced the saline solution with the blood packs we had on board, Seunghyun was still dying. It wasn’t enough. We didn’t have enough blood on board. So, I tricked the machine into taking mine, straight from the source. A DIY blood transfusion’.  
  
‘You’re the same blood type?’  
  
‘We are. I lay right here on the ground beside his body and I let the machine do its best to save him. Eventually, I lost too much blood and that was that. I woke up a week later in an infirmary. We both made it somehow. The ship made it to the nearest medical facility. Someone boarded us and found our bodies. I had the foresight to leave fake papers out so we were mistaken for traders instead of getting arrested. We should have died’.  
  
‘I can’t imagine doing that for somebody’.  
  
‘He’s not somebody. If he dies, I die.’  
  
‘But _why?_ You said the other day, out here you have to fend for yourself. I heard you say it’.  
  
Jiyong shrugs. He did say that. He would say it again and mean it because in his heart it applies to everyone on board, but not him. Not Seunghyun.  
  
‘I love him,’ he answers. ‘Have you ever been in love?’  
  
‘No’.  
  
‘Until you do, you can’t understand’.  
  
‘I guess not’.  
  
Jiyong feels a pang of sympathy. He hates this kid. He hates him for the life he threw away, hates him for his ignorance and for the danger he has placed on all of them, but he pities him too for his inexperience and his short future. He’ll never have the life out here that he has had with Seunghyun. That is something to pity, for a moment anyway.  
  
‘Did you know both your parents?’ Jiyong asks. ‘Are they still alive?’  
  
‘My father works in the mine. My mother in the clinic’.  
  
‘Siblings?’  
  
‘A younger sister’.  
  
‘Did you love her? Did you want her to be safe? If she fell down, would you pick her up? If she went missing, would you panic?’  
  
‘Yeah’.  
  
‘And your parents? Did you love them? Did they love you?’  
  
‘We fought a lot these last few years, but sure, I guess so’.  
  
‘You had a family,’ Jiyong says concretely.  
  
‘Yeah’.  
  
‘Do you know what it’s like on Earth?’  
  
‘What I see in the news packets, and a few stories I’ve heard since I left home. I know it’s hard outside the domes, but it’s a good life for people on the inside’.  
  
Jiyong smiles and takes a final drag of his cigarette, putting it out on the plate in his lap. He finds it hard to grasp the ignorance omnipresent through the system, even ten years on. It seems impossible that people can be so easily misled. Bad enough for people isolated on colonies, eating up the propaganda, but everyone else? The people capable of free movement? They have no excuse for their ignorance. They don’t want to know. They don’t care. The Earth problem is solving itself.  
  
‘There are 2 billion people on Earth,’ Jiyong says, ‘and only 500 million live under the domes. The rest of them are being irradiated. The population is dropping so quickly that in 100 years’ time, there won’t be anyone left alive outside the domes. Can you comprehend those numbers? The daily body count? The fight for resources? The hopelessness?’  
  
Rani scoffs in disbelief but doesn’t contradict him. He lets him talk.  
  
‘Seunghyun and I were both born in Seoul. I don’t remember my parents. He doesn’t remember his parents. His first memory is some Oliver Twist type shit, stealing with other children on behalf of an adult, in exchange for somewhere to sleep. I don’t remember my first memory. I was always alone. The only time I knew human kindness was when an old man took me in for a while. He was no better off than me, but for a year he did his best to keep me alive and healthy. He was nice. He taught me to read. He helped me’.  
  
‘What happened to him?’  
  
‘He died,’ Jiyong answers. ‘Like everybody else. All those people down there, stuck on that rock, too poor for the domes? They’re on borrowed time. Each generation lives less than the last, fertility is cascading, fewer children are being born and those that are, are born sick and compromised. My generation? Once we turn 40, we die. That’s it. By that point, our cells are too damaged. Seunghyun and I have a decade left and that’s the best-case scenario. One day, if we last, one of us will get a cough. That's how it starts, and then it's all over. A few painful weeks and then death. The cell damage we have? Not even the revival machines can patch it. Nanites can’t repair it. It’s final’.  
  
Rani shifts uncomfortably.  
  
‘How can you not know that?’ Jiyong presses.  
  
‘They don’t teach that stuff where I’m from’.  
  
‘No. Out here it’s all revisionist history. Most of the people out here were born here. In 100 years, children will be taught about the great emigration into space, and the global terraforming efforts to save planet Earth after catastrophic climate devastation and a global nuclear war. _Thank god for the domes!_ ’ he says in a commentator’s voice. ‘ _Once the domes were full, everyone else fled to space and populated asteroids and planets and moons, and everyone lived industriously, happily ever after,_ right?’  
  
‘Something like that’.  
  
‘When the domes were built, and the emigrations began, there were 6 billion people on Earth, but the capacity for people to go into space was infinitesimally small. For the first fifty years, your only ticket off Earth was having the skills necessary to bore holes into asteroids or with terraforming or mining experience. Builders. Architects. Manual labour. Five thousand people, maybe less’.  
  
‘But more followed’.  
  
‘Not four _billion_. There are maybe 400,000 people off-world right now, on colonies and outposts and asteroids, and on ships. Everybody else is dead or dying. The resources don’t exist out here to accommodate that many people. Even if they did, it costs money to get off-world. Money most people can’t even comprehend’.  
  
‘How did _you_ do it?’  
  
‘I gave up my humanity for my ticket off that planet. I did things I’ll never do again’.  
  
Rani grimaces, unsure whether to believe any of this or not. You can’t undo a lifetime of propaganda in five minutes. After all, the lies are so omnipresent, at times Jiyong wonders if what they experienced on Earth was ever real. It has taken effort to stay informed, to hear messages from the surface.  
  
‘I don’t know how we got to talking about this,’ Rani says, uncomfortably.  
  
‘You asked me why I would die for Seunghyun. _That’s_ why. Because we’re family. Because we have nobody else and we never did. You can’t appreciate the value of having something until you have _nothing’_.  
  
‘It just doesn’t seem like enough’.  
  
Jiyong smiles faintly.  
  
‘There’s survival and there’s life. With Seunghyun, I have a life. Trust. Respect. Loyalty. You don’t know how rare those things are yet because you’re new. You came out here out of boredom, looking for adventure. That’s not a good reason. The longer you stay out here, the more you’ll understand this isn’t where you want to be. What Seunghyun and I have? That was hard won and it’s rare _._ I guarantee you won’t find it’.  
  
Rani frowns, disgruntled at this sudden jab, and Jiyong’s anger flares again. It roils beneath the surface, because maybe life on the colonies are hard but they’re stable. Now that he has travelled and fought for his freedom, he couldn’t lock himself down into a life of labour, but if he were _born_ into it like this kid? If he and Seunghyun were born into a life that was arduous but reliable? He would never give that up.  
  
‘I resent you,’ Jiyong says softly. ‘I resent the fact that you threw away a good life so you could die alone in space, because that’s what’s coming for you. You had a family and you threw it away. You left, knowing you could never go back, and for what? Adventure?’  
  
Rani’s eyes widen in surprise.  
  
‘I don’t trust you,’ Jiyong continues. ‘You have put us all in danger and maybe there’s more you’re not telling me, I don’t know yet. Either way, when we land this ship you are confined to your bunk. If you try to come with us when we scout on the surface, if you leave your room at any point, I’ll consider that attempted sabotage and I’ll put a bullet in your brain because you’re a liability to us. Comprende?’  
  
He stands up and Rani keeps his gaze on the ground. Jiyong nudges his ashtray into the corner where he keeps it and heads for the door.  
  
‘Good talk,’ he says, closing it behind him.

  
  
*

 

 

‘He’s never been on a job before’.  
  
‘Who?’  
  
‘The kid. Rani. He confessed. He has no medical training. His only engineering qualifications come from being a handy on a colony. He scammed his way onto the ship. This is his first job and he’s only eighteen. He’s never even been in a fight’.  
  
Seunghyun sits on the edge of their small bed.  
  
‘You’re kidding’.  
  
‘No’.  
  
‘He just told you that?’  
  
‘He wanted to have a chat, so I _chatted,_ ’ Jiyong says. ‘I told him all about the fun life of a mercenary. He was shitting his pants at the end. I was a little harsh maybe’.  
  
Seunghyun sighs wearily and pulls the watch from his wrist, dropping it on the bedside table.  
  
‘Zelenetsky found him. Useless fuck’.  
  
‘The kid paid for realistic credentials, but Netsky obviously didn’t vet him. I told you’.  
  
‘You did. Silver lining, maybe I can finally kill him without any consequences’.  
  
‘Netsky? Then we’re _two_ crew down’.  
  
Jiyong toes his shoes off tiredly and kicks them into the corner. After Rani, he spent a few hours doing this and that, wandering about the ship, too angry and pent up to sleep. He has just come back to find Seunghyun coming off a shift keeping the pilot’s seat warm.  
  
‘The kid can’t come with us when we land,’ Seunghyun says knowingly. ‘He’s confined to his bunk. He’s a liability’.  
  
‘I already told him,’ Jiyong answers. ‘If he tries to come with us, I’ll shoot him myself’.  
  
‘I bet you told him so, too’.  
  
‘I did,’ Jiyong smiles. ‘He looked devastated when I left’.  
  
‘You’re _charming’._  
  
Seunghyun grabs him by the wrist and pulls him in, wrapping his arms around his waist, burying his face in his clothed stomach like it’s a pillow.  
  
‘He deserved it,’ Jiyong says, running a hand through Seunghyun’s hair. ‘He needs to know what he’s gotten himself into. I did him a favour’.  
  
‘I hope so. Christ. Who scams their way onto a government job with no experience? How fucking dumb is this kid?’  
  
‘Dumber than you think. He said you’re _nice_ though’.  
  
Seunghyun lifts his head from his stomach and Jiyong misses the warmth of his breath through the fabric  
  
‘And you?’ Seunghyun asks, his fingers tugging on the bottom of Jiyong’s shirt. ‘Do you think I’m nice or are you still on the offensive?’  
  
Jiyong smiles and pushes Seunghyun’s shoulder so he falls back on the bed.  
  
‘Relax. I’ve found a new victim for all my pent-up anger,’ he says. ‘But I do feel bad about the past week. I should make it up to you somehow’. He pulls his shirt over his head and throws it haphazardly in the direction of his shoes.  
  
Seunghyun’s eyes lock onto his bare skin.  
  
‘I’m so fucking tired, this is unfair’.  
  
‘We’ll be quick’.  
  
Jiyong shirks his pants while Seunghyun removes his own and they both slide beneath the sheets, beneath the nice blankets Seunghyun bartered for on their last vacation, and they fuck for what might be the twentieth time in three weeks, with so little else to do on their journey--- but this time is different, for him anyway. Less about boredom and needing a physical connection, and more about concern and desperation and bitterness about the lives they could have lived apart from this one. Just love, really. Maybe, after Rani, this particular sex should be rough and exorcising, freeing him of his complicated feelings—but it isn’t, because he is tired and Seunghyun is tired, so it is slow and nice and Jiyong finds his bitterness eking out in a mellow, pleasant way for a change.  
  
Seunghyun’s thrusts are slow, but deep and full, and he peppers Jiyong’s face with small kisses, which he doesn’t normally do, until Jiyong is compelled to hold Seunghyun’s jaw with one hand and say--- _“So dear I love him—”_  
  
Not needing to finish, not needing to recite Milton or reiterate what he said to Rani, that without him, he can live no live; that for him, he could endure or submit to any death.  
  
‘You looked at the simulation?’ Seunghyun answers knowingly, with a smile. ‘You saw the book’.  
  
Jiyong drops his hand back down to Seunghyun’s waist, gripping his skin tightly, relishing the way he flexes with each roll of his hips. Seunghyun gives a quick rough thrust and Jiyong’s lips part in surprise.  
  
‘I did. Sorry’.  
  
‘I knew you would. You have to wait to see the rest. I told you, I’m saving it. You can see it soon but not yet’.  
  
‘How mysterious’.  
  
‘A man needs to retain _some_ secrets’.  
  
Seunghyun rolls his hips in a different pattern, a new movement. He lifts Jiyong’s hips from the bed an inch before driving him back into the mattress as he thrusts. It’s quick and unexpected and Jiyong keens slightly at the satisfaction.  
  
_‘That’s_ not a secret. I know that move’.  
  
‘You know all my moves,’ Seunghyun answers. ‘We’re old men’.  
  
They swap positions. They roll and readjust until Jiyong is on top, riding him, the sheet lost around Seunghyun’s knees. Fatigue begins to claw at him from all sides, threatening to pull him from the comfort of Seunghyun’s body. Like the inner war before leaving a warm bed, sleep threatens him. Seunghyun yawns and Jiyong yawns with him and they both smile from contented embarrassment.  
  
Jiyong rests his hand on Seunghyun’s chest and his heart rate monitor lights up beneath the skin. Pressing his own, so they can see each-others clearly, Jiyong adjusts his movements. He rolls his hips faster and rougher and then slower and more gently until he figures it out and their heart rate monitors align, for a little while anyway. Then, he’s close and Seunghyun is close and for a minute or two, fatigue is forgotten in the desperation to feel more, feel faster, harder, better— Jiyong cums first with an audible cry, surprised by how quickly it hits him, and Seunghyun follows a movement later, taxing his oversensitive body.  
  
Jiyong collapses beside him, breathing heavily, yanking the sheets up, unwilling to clean up after himself tonight, he is too tired. He just slumps over Seunghyun’s chest, his cheek activating the monitor by accident. He moves to press it again, to turn it off, but traces the numbers with his fingers instead.  
  
‘You know, when I can’t sleep, I sometimes turn your monitor on and try to get our heart rates to align,’ he says quietly, yawning through it. ‘I’ve been doing it for years’.  
  
Seunghyun opens his eyes briefly, but it doesn’t last.  
  
‘You’ve never told me that’.  
  
‘A man should retain some secrets, right?'

  
  
  
* * *

   
  


  
Jiyong wakes before Seunghyun and takes his turn in the pilot’s seat, watching the readings for any sign of impending attack from unseen forces but there is nothing. Rani is visibly absent from whatever room he walks into after that, and a bitter peace transcends, finally, as the hours tick by. His pent-up stress and his _weird feeling_ abate as one day ticks over and the next flies by without incident. They are replaced by that buzzing calm before a storm, that feeling you get when there’s no going back, when no more choices can be made, when a situation is out of your control entirely. No more waiting, Jiyong thinks as the 48 th hour draws to its close. They are going to land the ship.  
  


  
  
  
* * *

 

 

 _‘A skip away from our own little solar system, this psychroplanet is a pleasant holiday destination for families and lovers alike. Speaking of, I'm looking at you two currently loitering in the hallway. Can you both sit the fuck down and get ready for entry---’_  
  
Jiyong holds his middle finger up to the camera above a nearby doorway, and looks back to Seunghyun.  
  
‘I’ll be fine,’ Seunghyun says quietly. ‘The landing seat downstairs is the same as on the bridge’.  
  
‘So make someone else sit in it’.  
  
_‘Jiyong’._  
  
‘I had a bad feeling, Seunghyun. You did too. Shouldn’t we stick together?’  
  
‘For a landing? This is the easy part’.  
  
Jiyong growls loudly in frustration and punches Seunghyun in the chest.  
  
‘You fuck. If anything happens, I swear to God---’  
  
The intercom crackles back into life and Zelenetsky’s voice continues its familiar planetary advertisement. It is part of his pre-landing warm up. Guo, suitably, is too busy doing her actual job.  
  
_‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the frontier. We'll be entering the atmosphere in about five minutes. The weather on the surface right now is a chilly minus fifty degrees Celsius so dress warm’._  
  
'Every fucking time, he does this,' Jiyong says.  
  
The intercom crackles back into life and a curt, 'Shut the fuck up. Get on the bridge,' comes loud and clear through Zelenetsky's Russian twang. Jiyong looks around, wary, and Seunghyun laughs.  
  
'How does he always know?'  
  
'Because you say something _every fuckin' time,_ ' Seunghyun explains.  
  
Jiyong grimaces and throws an entire full-body tantrum in a sharp two seconds, before planting his hands on Seunghyun’s face and kissing him.  
  
‘I love you. Be safe’.  
  
‘Yes, mother’.  
  
Jiyong punches him again.  
  
‘Don’t you ever say goodbye to me with a joke, Jesus Christ’.  
  
Seunghyun smiles but feigns admonishment, kissing him again in return.  
  
‘I love you too. See you soon’.  
  
Jiyong frowns but shoos him away, feeling all kinds of wrong about their unexpected separation. The seatbelt on one of the bridge chairs has broken. The only other chairs on the ship are in engineering and the storage space below it. It is a routine landing but from hereon out there is no point at which he’ll tolerate Seunghyun being out of his sight. There are too many unknowns on this job. Too much potential for unanticipated danger.  
  
Seunghyun blows a caddish kiss from the end of the hall and disappears down the hatchway. Jiyong takes a moment to swallow down his impending sense of doom, so loud in his head, he wonders how everyone else can be so calm—that they can’t feel it too. Still, there is nothing he can do. It is out of his hands. He trudges up to the bridge and straps himself in to the last open seat.  
  
For the next four minutes, he recites a prayer in his head, outwardly silent.  
  
They begin their descent.  
  
His blood rises in his ears, his pulse pounding in his head until he can hear nothing else.  
  
The straps against his chest tighten.  
  
Gravity pulls at him.  
  
He closes his eyes.  
  
He hears voices but can’t discern the words over the usual rattling of the ship as it nears the planet’s atmosphere.  
  
He breathes.  
  
In, out.  
  
His panic flares.  
  
In, out.  
  
It reaches an unexplainable pitch.  
  
His eyes shoot open and he holds his breath.  
  
In.  
  
And then for a moment, everything seems quiet and still.  
  
Out.  
  
He hears Guo say, ‘ _We’re almost there_ —’ that they are approaching the atmosphere.  
  
Then the bridge turns red and klaxons sound.

  
  
  
*

 

When it happens, they aren't together. Seunghyun is too far away for Jiyong to reach him in time. From the first, it is already too late. In his heightened sense of panic, he can pinpoint voices through the deafening roar of the ship shuddering and the klaxons sounding. He hears what is most important. There is a hole in the heat shield and their thrusters have malfunctioned. However it happened, it is a death sentence.  
  
Unthinking, Jiyong tears off his seatbelt as a reflex. He hears Guo say they have sixty seconds before they hit the atmosphere. Sixty seconds to reach Seunghyun before they both die. In the heat of his panic, he is rational enough to know they are meant to die together. That Seunghyun can’t die alone. So, he tries. He _runs_.    
  
At the end of the red-lit hallway, the panel nearest him explodes. Shards of plastic composite hit him like shrapnel and he is knocked into a wall. Hot phosphors rain down from the overhead as they begin to enter the atmosphere and relays overload one by one. In seconds, there is a sudden drop. A loss of gravity and a sharp peel to the left. The ship tilts and Jiyong goes with it. Unearthly groans like thunder resound through the hull in dull waves. He is dazed for a moment, but it runs through his head over and over— _it can’t happen like this._ They can’t die apart. He drags himself to the hatchway and jumps down, landing badly. He tastes iron.  
  
Down this hallway, past the crew quarters, down the hatchway at the far end and a few metres on. That's all it will take. In perfect conditions he could make it in twenty seconds. He fumbles for the walkway rail to keep him steady as he moves along but a bone rattling concussion knocks the ship, spinning it. Jiyong hits the floor and loose equipment tumbles out through an open door and buries him, until the ship spins again and he is knocked free, sliding several feet across the floor. He hits the opposite wall face first and a heavy steel canister lurches into his back, knocking the wind out of him.  
  
It is undignified and painful. He gasps for air that doesn’t come, but even winded--- breathless and afraid, he begins to crawl again. He wonders why it is that Seunghyun hasn’t done the same—hasn’t met him here, half-way. Maybe he is injured. Maybe he is already dead.  
  
Jiyong tries to drag himself to the nearest intercom. If he can’t reach Seunghyun in time, maybe he can _say_ goodbye--- but another concussion rocks the ship. Loose equipment slides toward him. He rolls at the last second to avoid being crushed and jams his fingers into the grating of the floor. He is just in time. He holds on as the ship rolls. He is yanked and pulled until the ceiling is below him and his feet dangle above it, his fingers in the floor above. Beneath him, heavy equipment and metal sheeting are thrown from side to side. He tries to tuck his legs up to protect them.  
  
The ship lurches and gravity tries to pull him down but his fingers are locked in the grate. His shoulder dislocates and his fingers release. He drops, landing on already broken bones. He crawls another metre, numb to the pain. He reaches the hatchway but the ship has rolled and it is now above him, out of reach. Unless it rolls again, he has no way of going further---  
  
Static flares over the intercom and he thinks he might hear a voice but then it happens. The metal above him cracks, struts and girders twist and bend. The ship shudders, falling suddenly down, then a panel beside him explodes and he is caught in it. Fire blossoms from beneath his skin into succouring wounds.  
  
It eats him alive, fast, but not fast enough, and for the seventh time, he dies.

 

 


	3. Here Be Dragons

 

  
  
When he wakes up, it is violent. Light pierces his vision. It is like being reborn, torn from somewhere dark and dead and thrust into something new. When his eyes open, he gasps. Pain runs through him like a current. It is unbearable. He has never been in so much pain, or maybe he has. He doesn’t remember anything. Who he is. Where he is. Life. Anything.  
  
He can’t focus. Shapes appear and disappear in his vision like mirages. He narrows his eyes and things that exist cease to be. It’s jarring. He can’t make anything out. Everything is so bright. It is like the world is being taken apart and rearranged. His stomach lurches. It makes acid rise in his throat—and he coughs. There is something in his throat. He reaches feebly for the thing that shouldn’t be there and finds a tube. Without any thought, he tears it out. Soon, he is coughing up liquid. The taste of metal coats his teeth.  
  
Something touches him and his instinctive reaction is to pull away, but he feels pinned. He feels heavy. Immovable. He lashes out with his hands but he is easily subdued. He feels something sharp in his neck, and something cold seep into his body. Then, it all goes dark.

  
  
_*_

 

The next time he wakes, it is gentler. He wakes to the same brightness and the same blurred vision. But this time, he lies still and quiet. He stares at a point in the whiteness until the world around him starts to take shape more concretely. He hears the soft drone of machinery now, and smells metal and antiseptic. There is nothing in his throat.  
  
He turns his head, but only an inch. He struggles to move. He wiggles his fingers and toes, so he knows he isn’t paralysed, but his body feels weighted. His muscles are tight and stiff. Fatigue blankets him. It takes all of his energy to roll his head more fully to the side. His cheek touches a pillow and he is so consumed by tiredness, he feels himself falling asleep, but something catches his eye and he pulls himself back. He sees Seunghyun. He remembers him. He knows him. The sight of him helps centre his thoughts. _I am Kwon Jiyong_.  
  
Seunghyun is asleep, his long limbs curled through the armrest of a metal chair. His mouth is hanging open. A thin blanket sits around his shoulder, its tail trailing on the ground where he has moved in his sleep. Jiyong is relieved. Seunghyun is alive. Seunghyun is important. He rebuilds the memories of his life around Seunghyun. He is the _centre_. The trunk from which everything Jiyong knows about himself branches off of.  
  
As if reading his thoughts, Seunghyun stirs and his dark eyes open. It takes him a moment but when Seunghyun sees him, relief visibly washes over him.  
  
'Welcome back,' he says, dragging his chair closer to the bed.  
  
Jiyong cranes his neck as much as he can bear to meet Seunghyun's lips, pressed softly against his forehead. The touch fills him with relief and gratitude. They are together again. He doesn’t know why they wouldn’t be, but something niggles in the back of his brain. Some awareness.  
  
'Hi,' Jiyong smiles. His voice barely comes out. The air sticks in his throat like kindling. 'What happened?'  
  
Seunghyun rests his elbow on the bed with his palm open and his fingers fanned out. With his eyes, Jiyong follows the heel of Seunghyun's palm to the base of his ring finger. _The tally._ Hairs stand on the back of his neck and he feels a familiar nausea. The first dark line begins at the base of Seunghyun's finger, just above the crease and each succeeding line moving upwards is spaced a few millimetres apart. Jiyong counts the familiar tattoos and Seunghyun points them out to him; one, two, three, four, five, and the last he remembers-- six. Above that is a new line, fresher than the others, the skin pink and slightly raised. Seunghyun's pointer finishes its journey on the seventh tattooed line and he doesn't have to say anything.  
  
Their eyes meet and Jiyong offers a wan, conciliatory smile.  
  
'I died?'  
  
'Big exit number seven,' Seunghyun answers coolly.  
  
‘I don’t remember anything’.  
  
There is nothing concrete. He tries to collect his last memories but nothing sticks. He doesn’t know where they are or what he was doing when he died. He doesn’t remember anything. He usually does. The revival machine has its flaws. This is one. When you are revived, you are brought back whole. That means memories too. If you die violently, you retain knowledge of it. That’s how Jiyong knows Seunghyun remembers _his_ worst death. It’s the reason, for two turbulent years, they self-medicated together, struggling to cope with violent memories no-one is supposed to have.  
  
Lying here now, with Seunghyun’s concerned face looking down on him, Jiyong can vividly remember his fourth death—a blade entering his gut, tearing upwards. He remembers the feel of it. He remembers clutching his gut. He remembers warm blood flowing through his fingers. He remembers every part of it vividly, but not this death. Nothing about this one.  
  
‘What _do_ you remember?’  
  
‘I don’t know,’ Jiyong answers, voice quiet and rough. ‘There’s nothing’.  
  
Pain travels across his collarbone as he talks and he loses focus, tripping over his own tongue. He has so many pains, it’s stifling. They coalesce like a heavy blanket. Every action exacerbates the pain. Breathing. Blinking. Swallowing. Seunghyun leans closer, talking sympathetically.  
  
‘Do you remember the job we were on?’  
  
Jiyong closes his eyes and he really _tries_ , because he wants Seunghyun to get the answers he needs, but every thought slips through his fingers the second he tries to organise them. He skirts the memories he needs but he can’t hold onto them. He remembers a folder and a photograph. Not a smash and grab. No theft. No murder.  
  
‘Missing people?’  
  
‘That’s right,’ Seunghyun answers.  
  
And it was mostly a lucky guess. It popped into his head, but he has no real recollection. He can remember no details. Seunghyun strokes his forehead the way he sometimes does, like he’s brushing a hair from his face, but he isn’t. Seunghyun is just mimicking the action, stroking his head with a gentle thumb for comfort. The recurring sweep feels nice and meditative, but at the same time unfamiliar. There is something different about the sensation. It takes Jiyong a moment to realise what it is. His hair bristles under Seunghyun’s touch. It is short, maybe even shaved. His longer hair is gone.  
  
‘We took a government listing,’ Seunghyun continues in a quiet, gentle voice. ‘Two ships went missing while orbiting a planet on the frontier, so we came to check it out. There was no trace of them. We tried to land but our heat shield failed. Punctured, we thought, by debris. We had no thrusters’.  
  
The facts turn in Jiyong’s head. He tries to process them individually. He has no recollection of taking a listing. He has no memory of a planet or being near the frontier. If the heat shield failed while trying to land, how are they still alive? If it were all true, where are they now? He can hear the distant throb of machinery but can’t feel the vibration of a ship. They are not in orbit. They are not on a medical station. He hasn’t got the strength to move his head for a better look, but the room they are in is white and well-lit and their own ship long ago eschewed that kind of luxury.   
  
‘Where are we?’  
  
‘We crashed,’ Seunghyun answers simply. ‘We’re on the surface’.  
  
The thought makes his head spin. It answers part of a question, but not all. He tries to focus his mind on the simple questions he has to ask but his head aches at the effort. Every time he tries to rationalise and understand the situation, he feels pain more deeply. It hurts to talk.  
  
‘But where _are_ we?’  
  
He feels Seunghyun shrug more than he sees it.  
  
‘It’s complicated,’ he answers. ‘I have a lot to catch you up on but it can wait. Everything is okay right now. I need you to rest’.  
  
Seunghyun runs a soft finger up the side of his face and Jiyong closes his eyes at the touch. It doesn’t hurt him like everything else does. Seunghyun senses it and repeats the motion for two or three minutes, softly stroking the side of his face in silence. When he finally withdraws, the pain comes back. It is like liquid filling him up from the inside. Jiyong’s words come out in a whisper.  
  
_‘Everything hurts’._  
  
Seunghyun kisses him on the side of the head and Jiyong sees his frown and pity with his eyes closed.  
  
‘Your revival didn’t go smoothly’.  
  
Jiyong opens his eyes and squints in the light.  
  
‘It was a hard landing,’ Seunghyun says. ‘I got you in the machine as fast as I could, but everything was on fire. Walls were missing. Floors were gone. There was exposed circuitry the entire length of the ship.’ He pauses a moment and sighs, as if taking his first real breath since it happened. ‘Still, I got you there and the machine was in one piece’.  
  
Up until now, Seunghyun has looked warm but calm. A comforting and sedate presence. Now, creases line his forehead. He frowns. His lip bends. It makes Jiyong’s stomach turn.  
  
‘What’s wrong?’  
  
‘Jiyong, you were _gone_ ,’ Seunghyun answers emotionally. ‘You have no idea. I don’t understand how the machine brought you back. You were burned all over. I could barely see skin’.  
  
Jiyong winces as Seunghyun’s words sink in. His cheeks flush. He feels himself heat up at the thought. He died in a fire? An explosion maybe. The thought makes him feel ill. He has never burned before. He always thought, morbidly, that his final death would be fire; that the universe would come calling for him and dispose of him the way he had so many others. Justice at last.  
  
Seunghyun’s brow furrows. He is rattled. His discomfort puts Jiyong on edge. They are both veterans of death but this reaction of Seunghyun’s is new. Maybe it’s the situation they are in. If they have crashed and are on the surface of some frontier planet, that could be enough to shake him. Maybe not. Jiyong feels it’s more personal than that.  
  
‘You’re not fully healed,’ Seunghyun says. ‘The machine broke down before it could finish. It revived you and it healed your internal injuries, and most of the burns and scars but before it could finish, it broke down. Your collarbone is still broken, and your wrist. You have a burn--- from here,’ he says gently, touching the bottom of Jiyong’s ear, ‘to here,’ he says, touching the outside of his shoulder. ‘That’s going to hurt until we can get you out of here. Any other pain is probably soft tissue stuff. Muscle pain. The result of an incomplete revival. Your body is under stress’.  
  
Jiyong takes this news with equanimity. He is in more pain that he has felt in years but it has a cause and now he knows what it is. He’ll heal soon enough. The pain will dissipate.  
  
‘My face?’  
  
‘All healed,’ Seunghyun smiles gingerly. ‘You’re still handsome’.  
  
‘My hair is gone’.  
  
Seunghyun’s smile falters and he drops his gaze for a moment.  
  
‘Yeah. There wasn’t much left of your hair,’ he says. ‘Just patches. I shaved it off’.  
  
‘How does it look?’  
  
‘It looks good’.  
  
Seunghyun runs a gentle hand over his shaved head. Jiyong smiles and a tear rolls down his cheek onto the pillow. He is surprised by it. He feels overwhelmed but he doesn’t know why. It’s more than the pain. It’s something else. An underlying current of stress and uncertainty. There is something in the back of his head desperately vying to be remembered. Some latent terror being ignored; and it is that. Terror. He recognises it—but it’s so muted and fuzzy. He wonders if it isn’t residual fear from his death. After all, what is there left to be afraid of? He is alive. Seunghyun is alive. Nothing else matters.  
  
‘Are you okay?’  
  
‘I’m fine,’ Seunghyun answers. ‘The part of the ship I was in was well protected. I just got knocked around a bit. Cuts and scrapes, that’s all. I still got to you in time. If you were on the bridge where you were supposed to be, I wouldn’t have—but you were close to me. You made it easy for me’.  
  
Jiyong has no memory of it, but he understands the implications. If something had gone wrong, he would have tried to get to wherever Seunghyun was. There has never been an emergency where he didn’t do that.  
  
‘Thanks for finding me’.  
  
Seunghyun smiles in answer, but it’s sad somehow. Jiyong doesn’t know why. They are safe. Waking up after a revival is usually different to this. Everything feels wrong somehow, off kilter. Maybe it was the machine not finishing--- maybe there are vital pieces of him missing. He would give anything for his pain to go away. Anything to have a clear head for five minutes so he could figure it out.  
  
‘I wish I could do more for you’, Seunghyun says, restrained. ‘I can’t fix the machine. I’ve tried. We just don’t have the parts. At the moment, there’s nothing more I can do for you. You’ll have to heal the old-fashioned way’.  
  
A tear rolls down Seunghyun’s cheek unexpectedly and Jiyong is caught off guard. Neither of them are averse to crying. In their line of work, it’s hard not to, but they don’t do it very often all the same. Seunghyun has been through worse than whatever is happening now and not shed a tear. Now, he wipes his face and takes a deep breath. It shudders out of him. Jiyong wants to cup Seunghyun’s cheek and wipe the wetness from his face but he doesn’t have the strength. His weakness frustrates him. He can only speak.  
  
‘It’s okay,’ he says quietly.  
  
He is alive. Seunghyun has saved him again. Against impossible odds, he has survived a seventh death and they are together. There can’t be any regrets.  
  
‘No,’ Seunghyun sniffs. He shakes his head furiously. ‘I really thought you were dead this time. When I picked you up, your skin came away beneath my fingers,’ he says. ‘When you were in that machine, I just---’  
  
Jiyong frowns and his stomach turns. Seunghyun hangs his head. He tries to control his emotions, but it’s hard for him. Whatever he’s been through has shaken him. Seunghyun shrugs, helpless.  
  
‘It was crazy,’ he says. ‘The ship was on fire. There was steel groaning all over the ship, and all I could think about was my gun. The ship had rolled so many times, I didn’t know how I was going to find it to shoot myself in the head, because you were done for,’ he says sadly. ‘Things were that bad. From the beginning, I had no hope. The second I put you in that machine, I was looking for an out’.  
  
‘Seunghyun’.  
  
_'Fuck.’_  
  
Seunghyun yells mutedly, and shakes his hands and arms, as if trying to exorcise his pain. He tries to shake his distress away. His confession makes Jiyong ache in a real way. He has felt the same but Seunghyun isn’t the type to say those things aloud. For him, it has always been unspoken. It makes Jiyong feel uncomfortable that he has no recollection of what happened. He tries harder now to touch Seunghyun. He uses every ounce of strength he has and manages to lift his hand enough to attract Seunghyun’s attention, who interlaces their fingers on the bed.  
  
‘You’ve been unconscious in this bed for days. I didn’t know if you were going to wake up. The only doctor here is a scientist who did two months of combat medical training before changing specialities twenty-five years ago’.  
  
‘I’m awake now’.  
  
_‘And I’m so fucking glad to see you’._  
  
Seunghyun drops his head onto the back of Jiyong’s hand on the bed and Jiyong closes his eyes again. He tries to fight it, but he can’t. He is so exhausted, it’s like nothing he’s experienced before. It’s like dying in a way. It reminds him of death. An unfightable pull into a dark place. Still, he hears Seunghyun’s words. There is a scientist here. He wants to know more. He wants to ask questions, but he can’t. He slips back into sleep, unable to say or think another thing.

 

  
  
  
* * *

 

 

  
It tastes bitter. It’s so dry he can barely swallow it. The crumbs get stuck in his throat and he struggles to get them down. Seunghyun holds a pack of water to his lips and Jiyong swallows some.  
  
‘You have to eat it,’ he says sympathetically. ‘You haven’t eaten in two weeks. This goop can only do so much,’ he says, tapping the IV bag still connected to the back of his hand.  
  
Jiyong rolls his eyes but opens his mouth for another piece of the ration bar Seunghyun has been feeding him. He has been awake for a few hours. He feels better in his head, but he is physically weak. He doesn’t have the energy to feed himself. He gets tired in seconds. Small movements make his heart pound from the exertion. Still, he tries again. He pushes Seunghyun’s hand away once the next piece is in his mouth, but his arm drops to the bed immediately. He struggles to swallow the dry food before cursing.  
  
‘Fuck’.  
  
‘It will take you a few days to feel stronger’.  
  
The small act of raising his arm makes Jiyong feel weak. His heart races. For the first time since waking up, he tries to check his monitor. He struggles to raise his hand to his chest. When he does, he presses the skin and nothing happens.  
  
‘Guess I’m dead,’ he mumbles.  
  
‘Not yet,’ Seunghyun smiles. ‘But the monitors don’t work down here’.  
  
‘Damaged?’  
  
‘I don’t think so. It’s something else. Interference’.  
  
Jiyong grimaces.  
  
‘Interference from what? Are you going to fill me in?’  
  
‘I hoped your memory would come back first’.  
  
‘Well it hasn’t,’ Jiyong answers testily.  
  
Seunghyun sighs and Jiyong frowns, apologetic. He is just frustrated. Seunghyun has told him almost nothing. All he knows so far is that they crashed two weeks ago. He woke up four days ago for ten minutes and again a few hours ago. That’s it. Everything else is _missing._ His absent memories feel like a violation. Like someone has stolen from him.  
  
‘You’re still weak’.  
  
‘My brain works,’ Jiyong says. ‘Fill me in. I won’t eat anymore of this garbage until you tell me what’s going on’.  
  
Seunghyun looks at the ration bar in his hand and rolls his eyes, taking a bite for himself.  
  
‘Fine. I’ll catch you up’.  
  
He throws the remaining bar onto a nearby tray and runs a hand through his hair. He looks tired. Jiyong wonders if he has spent the last two weeks in this room with him. In this makeshift infirmary, because that’s what it is. There are two beds, a sink, some shelves and equipment. There are small pieces he recognises from the revival machine. A motherboard sits on a bench attached dangerously to a jury-rigged power source. Maybe Seunghyun has spent his time trying to fix the machine; tinkering hopelessly to stay occupied.  
  
‘I told you we were looking for missing ships on the frontier,’ Seunghyun begins. ‘Well, I may have understated the job. The first ship was manned by scientists. They were sent to a frontier planet to build a research habitat. They sent a message from orbit then disappeared. The government sent a rescue team which went a similar way. They sent a message from orbit then all communications ceased. Both ships went quiet. Both were presumed destroyed. The government put out a listing for a third salvage operation. They wanted to outsource it’.  
  
‘And we took the job,’ Jiyong says knowingly.  
  
‘We did’.  
  
‘So what happened?’  
  
‘It took a couple of weeks to get here, but we made it without any problems. We did the usual scans and found nothing. There was no trace of either ship. Nothing in orbit or on the surface. It was a standard psychroplanet. There was nothing strange about it. We orbited for two days. If the other ships were taken for scrap or boarded by someone, we wanted to smoke them out. Nothing happened,’ Seunghyun says. ‘So we decided to land and take a look around’.  
  
‘And we crashed’.  
  
‘The second we approached the atmosphere, something went wrong. I don’t know what happened. At the time, it seemed like debris. It seemed like something punctured the heat shield and knocked out our thrusters’.  
  
‘Seemed like?’  
  
‘Yeah, well--- here’s the thing,’ Seunghyun says tiredly. ‘This planet is fucked’.  
  
Jiyong’s eyebrows rise.  
  
‘Fucked?’  
  
‘ _Fucked,’_ Seunghyun answers. ‘We crashed the ship. That, you know. Here’s the surprise. We crashed two klicks from a second ship and the remnants of a third. The scientists were here the whole time. Like us, they hit the atmosphere and everything went wrong. The rescue team crashed too but only one of six survived. All six scientists are alive. They cannibalised their ship like they originally intended and put most of the habitat together. They have a fledging hydro bay and this makeshift infirmary,’ Seunghyun says, gesturing around them. As well as a few crew quarters and two science stations. When we crashed, they tried to help but I couldn’t leave the ship. I couldn’t move you. If I disconnected the machine, you would die’.  
  
‘How long did it take to revive me?’  
  
‘Three days’.  
  
‘You stayed on the crashed ship for three days?’  
  
‘I didn’t sleep,’ Seunghyun answers honestly. ‘Every second I expected the roof to come down, or the floor to give way beneath us. I had to stand on a container the whole time because the ship was so hot, if I touched the ground, it would burn me. It would burn through my suit. Parts of the ship were still on fire’.  
  
‘Seunghyun’.  
  
‘I shored up the room. I figured out a way to keep the power going a little longer. I bought the machine time to save you’.  
  
‘I’m sorry you had to do that’.  
  
‘What was the alternative?’ he shrugs. ‘I did what I could. After I got you out, the ship fell to pieces. The scientists salvaged what they could from it, but one way or another, it’s gone. This habitat is all we’ve got. And it’s small. We’ll run low on resources. It was built for six people. There’s eleven of us’.  
  
Jiyong does the mathematics in his head. If all six scientists are alive, and someone from the rescue team too, that means---  
  
‘Who’s dead?’  
  
Seunghyun frowns.  
  
‘Guo. Okafor. Wake. Zelenetsky survived’.  
  
Jiyong feels a pang in his heart. He can’t say those people were his friends, but they were something to him. They were a crew. They were a makeshift family. Okafor most of all. Okafor had been there since the beginning; since he and Seunghyun first found the ship and went into business. Okafor had always been brash and overbearing, insipid and selfish—but they all had flaws. Jiyong grew used to him. Guo was newer. Wake had been with them for two years. They were a good enough crew. They all worked together. They had a kind of symbiosis.  
  
‘Rani’s alive too’.  
  
‘Who?’  
  
‘A new kid,’ Seunghyun answers wearily. ‘He conned his way onto the ship with fake papers, posing as a mechanic with med experience. He came straight from a colony. You confronted him before we crashed. You were not a fan’.  
  
‘He’s alive and the others are dead?’  
  
Jiyong sighs and slumps. This has been more than a disaster. The loss of the crew is a burden, but the ship too? The ship was home. It was a rusting, broken down piece of shit—but it was all they had. He and Seunghyun had made a life on that ship and with those people. Now? His mind turns. He tries to process the loss and the facts. He tries to process _all_ of it.  
  
‘You said we scanned for the missing ships in orbit. You said there was no trace of them on the surface. How is that possible with a functioning habitat down here?’  
  
Seunghyun shrugs.  
  
‘I don’t know. There’s interference or something. The planet reads one way from above and another from down here. It’s like the surface is camouflaged. I don’t know how. Nothing makes sense. This planet is a freakshow. You don’t know the half of it. The scientists have been working on it but the more they unravel, the less sense it makes. All I know is they can’t get messages out’.  
  
‘That’s why the ships couldn’t make contact’.  
  
‘Yeah’.  
  
‘Which means we can’t make contact either’.  
  
‘Bingo’.  
  
‘We’re trapped?’  
  
‘There’s the rub’.  
  
‘Why did the other ships crash? Debris?’  
  
‘They don’t know. Nobody knows. Something’s off though. You can’t have one planet from above and another from below. There’s something going on up there,’ he gestures to the sky. ‘There’s a barrier. Some change in atmosphere that fries any ship that goes through’.  
  
‘That means any ship that follows will have the same issue’.  
  
‘Including any potential rescuers’.  
  
‘And we have no way of making contact with anyone?’  
  
‘Not yet,’ Seunghyun sighs. ‘But getting a message out is our only shot. None of the ships are salvageable. If we can’t make contact, we’ll die here’.  
  
‘Fuck’.  
  
‘Fuck is right. With dwindling resources, the lack of space is the least of our worries. We’ll run out of food, water and air within three months. It takes three weeks for any ship from Earth to get here, even if they send someone else, and that’s only if they’re equipped with one of the new-line engines, which are rare and expensive. The chances of the government throwing another one in the fire are slim to none. A ship without the engine won’t get here for months. There aren’t a lot of chances for rescue here’.  
  
Jiyong closes his eyes and lets the bleak reality wash over him. It fills him with fear. He isn’t the type to say he isn’t afraid of dying, because he is. Each death makes him more afraid of the final one. He always imagined it would involve fire, or violence. That it would be quick and brutal. He never entertained the possibility of dying slowly, of suffocating or starving to death. But even if no rescue comes and their resources drain--- the end may still be violent.  
  
‘If no-one comes and we can’t get a message out, things will get hairy’.  
  
‘I know,’ Seunghyun answers quietly. ‘I don’t think the others have thought so far ahead. They’re confident we’ll all get out of here. But once they realise the chances aren’t good? When we hit that two-month mark?’  
  
‘They’ll start fighting over resources’.  
  
Seunghyun nods knowingly. It’s obvious that over the last two weeks, he has thought a lot about this. He has weighed up their chances and found them bleak. It is obvious too, that he hasn’t shared his opinion with the others. Jiyong wants to grab Seunghyun’s hand, but he feels physically drained. It is too much of a strain.  
  
‘Give me the rest of that ration bar,’ he says instead. ‘I should eat while there’s still food. I’d like to be walking around before everyone starts killing each-other’.  
  
Seunghyun smiles and breaks a piece off the bar, putting it in Jiyong’s mouth. Immediately Jiyong grimaces from the dryness. Each bite is worse than the last. When he swallows, Seunghyun gives him another sip of water and Jiyong frowns.  
  
‘If the worst happens, what then?’  
  
The prospect makes him tired. When there is a chance of survival, he will fight until his last breath. He will do whatever it takes. He would kill every person in this habitat to prolong Seunghyun’s life—to give him that chance. But in a situation void of hope, he doesn’t want to go out that way. He doesn’t want to kill people without cause. He doesn’t want to starve to death, or slowly become delirious from lack of oxygen. He knows Seunghyun has already planned ahead. He has plotted their deaths already. It is written on his face.  
  
‘Well,’ Seunghyun answers, leaning in close. ‘If that happens, I think you and I will go outside in our suits. Together. We’ll find a nice place to lie down and we’ll take off our helmets’.  
  
Jiyong’s stomach turns. Hearing Seunghyun say it makes it that much more real. In the back of his mind, he feels the seriousness of their situation. For a decade, they have defied the odds together. Maybe this is how it ends. Quietly slipping out of existence, unseen and unheard. And there are worse deaths. It is worse to die violently and apart. If death has to come, let it be this way. Let them be together.

  
  
* * *

 

 

 

  
The light shines above him in streams, thick strips of green and pink, waving as if caught in a breeze. The window is small, the plastic so thick and concave, it is hard to see with any clarity. Still, it is beautiful. He hasn’t seen one in years. He ducks down to get a better look through the window and winces. The figure 8 brace for his broken collarbone tugs at him. It hurts his fracture and the burn running down his neck.  
  
‘There shouldn’t be auroras on this planet,’ he says, straightening up.  
  
Seunghyun shrugs beside him.  
  
‘There shouldn’t be a lot of things. You read some of the reports?’  
  
Jiyong nods, frowning. He was stuck in the infirmary for days, eating whatever he could keep down, building the strength necessary to get up and walk around. Seunghyun brought him a padd to keep himself entertained, so Jiyong read what he could. There were meteorological reports from the scientists, spanning the few weeks the habitat had been up and running, and Seunghyun was right. The planet was inconsistent. Nothing made sense.  
  
The readouts for this planet are gibberish. As soon as one thing begins to make sense, something contradicts it. Jiyong is glad to be on his feet again. He wants to talk to the scientists first hand. He wants to see their machines. He wants to know their theories, not just read the bare facts on a tablet.  So, Seunghyun gives him the tour. Half the scientists are outside the hab in suits, working on experiments or doing routine maintenance, but there is someone in the first of the two labs they enter.  
  
‘This is Brandt,’ Seunghyun says. ‘He’s an exogeologist’.  
  
The man turns and nudges his glasses down his nose. He is squat and round; purple cheeked with a large mouth.  
  
‘You’re awake,’ he says, with assumed indifference.  
  
Jiyong nods.  
  
‘Guess so’.  
  
He takes the man’s lead and doesn’t offer his hand or say _nice to meet you_. The scientists body language lets him know it would be unwelcome. The reception is a little off-putting, but better than the alternative. He is still tired. Too much enthusiasm would drain him.  
  
‘How’s the geology?’  Jiyong asks wryly.  
  
‘Consistent,’ the man answers cryptically. ‘It’s about the only science that does check out. So far, anyway’.  
  
Jiyong offers a thin smile in answer. It seems like the original crew have formed a united front; them against this planet that dares to defy classification. He was hoping for some more information than _consistent_. What have they discovered so far about the planet itself? He has read reports on meteorology, about the atmosphere, even a touch of microbiology. Nothing about the geology. On the screen over Brandt’s shoulder is a sliver of rock and a series of photographs. Jiyong recognises striations but doesn’t know what they mean. Not on a planet unfamiliar to him.  
  
He shivers unexpectedly and Seunghyun touches his elbow.  
  
‘Are you cold?’  
  
‘A little’.  
  
‘I’ll go get your jacket. I managed to save some things from the ship before it went—’ Seunghyun mimes an explosion. Jiyong smiles faintly and rolls his neck, watching Seunghyun disappear down the small hallway. He is sorry to see him go.  
  
‘It must feel good to get out of the infirmary,’ Brandt says, struggling to fake an interest.  
  
‘It is,’ Jiyong answers simply, ‘you don’t have any good drugs in there. What’s the deal with that? None of you have a medical degree? Don’t all missions like this require a doctor?’  
  
‘No. Just basic first aid. You do a course. You’re done. We had a surgery-assist robot but it was damaged in the crash’.  
  
‘Lucky me’.  
  
‘You _are_ lucky’.  
  
Brandt barely hides a flash of disdain and Jiyong thinks he understands the unsaid complaints; that the man came to this planet to do a job and despite a horrific crash, intends to finish it. Having to take in survivors is a distraction. The presence of new bodies upsets the variables planned for. Less food. Less space. Less air.  
  
Seunghyun returns before Jiyong can say anything in response, and he’s glad. Seunghyun slings the jacket over his shoulders and Jiyong feels better immediately. With his physical weakness has come unintended side-effects. He is always _cold._ Brandt catches the embroidered dragon patch on the shoulder of his jacket and eyes it warily. He is discrete but Jiyong knows the look. He has years of similar recognition to fall back on. The mans defences go up, so Jiyong’s do too.  
  
‘I hear you’re a trader,’ Brandt says warily, looking him in the eye.  
  
Jiyong smiles.  
  
‘Amongst other things’.  
  
Seunghyun must have spun a story about their occupation. They always carry fake papers saying they are merchants or traders. He knows the shared lie implicitly. This man could ask him any question and Jiyong would answer the right way to corroborate Seunghyun’s information. They have become experts in their shared deceptions.  
  
‘That’s an interesting jacket,’ Brandt says. ‘Where did you get it?’  
  
Jiyong wonders what the purpose of this circuitous interrogation is. If the man believes he is who he is, why not ask him point blank? But maybe he isn’t _certain_. Maybe he wants Jiyong to dispel his concerns and tell him he traded someone for this jacket; that he paid good money for it. Jiyong thinks about telling that lie but worries what will happen if these people discover his real identity later. Ignorance breeds suspicion and fear. If he is honest from the beginning, he will know where he stands. Realistically, it lessens the risks.  
  
‘It’s mine,’ Jiyong answers. ‘I had it made’.  
  
Brandt pales and frowns.  
  
‘That patch. I’ve heard about it’.  
  
‘Yeah? What did you hear?’  
  
‘That you’re a prolific murderer’.  
  
‘That’s true’.  
  
Brandt recoils at the immediate answer and moves quickly despite his heavy frame. He pulls a laser scalpel from a nearby tray and holds it between them. His forehead glistens in the light. His detached contempt has been shattered. Seunghyun steps between them with his arms out, trying to calm the man down.  
  
‘Hey, relax. Nobody is going to hurt you’.  
  
The man swings the scalpel in Seunghyun’s direction.  
  
‘Who are you? You’re with him, right? You’re not traders. All of you, who are you?’  
  
Jiyong tugs Seunghyun back and steps forward.  
  
‘Mercenaries,’ he says simply. ‘The other survivors from the crash are our crew’.  
  
‘What are you doing out here? You didn’t come to _save_ us’.  
  
‘Yes, we did. We took a government listing to find you. There was a reward’.  
  
The scalpel dips as the mans arm weakens.  
  
‘Well, _good job’._  
  
‘Brandt,’ Seunghyun says tentatively. ‘I’ve been talking to you for two weeks. Relax. We didn’t come here to hurt you. Everything I said was true. I just omitted some information. It wasn’t relevant’.  
  
‘You’re murderers. That’s not relevant? You didn’t tell us who this was,’ he says, gesturing at Jiyong. ‘We put ourselves at risk to help you’.  
  
‘We did the same for you,’ Jiyong snaps.  
  
The scalpel veers back in Jiyong’s direction.  
  
‘You’re on the watchlist,’ Brandt sweats. ‘They send alerts out. You were on the list. You’ve killed _scientists’_.  
  
‘I took jobs,’ Jiyong answers. ‘Don’t take it personally. I’ve killed more bad people than good. Drug peddlers and smugglers, hitmen and terrorists. I’ve done the public a service’.  
  
The man barks out a short laugh.  
  
‘You must be a psychopath’.  
  
‘I’m a person, like you,’ Jiyong scowls. ‘I do what I have to, to survive. You think you’re moral?’  
  
Brandt blusters and shakes his head.  
  
_‘Me?’_  
  
‘You work for the government,’  Jiyong answers. ‘Who are committing genocide. You’re an accessory. Instead of using your brain to save the people on Earth outside the domes, you’re here, on the frontier, in a research habitat we both know is just a precursor to a mining operation’.  
  
The scientist flinches.  
  
‘You’re just a cog in the machine. You make it easier to rape and pillage planets and asteroids for their resources. Resources which go where?’  
  
‘The colonies’.  
  
‘No. The domes and places like Paradise,’ Jiyong corrects. ‘Your big brain is a tool to make rich people more comfortable’.  
  
‘My work is important,’ the man blusters.  
  
‘No, it’s not’.  
  
The mans face reddens and Seunghyun steps forward again, his arms raised. He could disarm the man easily, he just chooses not to. Neither of them are in any danger. Even with his arm in a sling and his shoulders braced, Jiyong could kill this man.  
  
‘No,’ the man says emotionally. ‘When the others come back, I’ll tell them who you are. We aren’t wasting our air on you. Either of you. You’re criminals’.  
  
_‘Brandt,’_ Seunghyun says seriously. The man swings the laser scalpel back to Seunghyun, waving it in his face. ‘We’ve had a comfortable two weeks. It would be a shame to let your emotions get the better of you now’.  
  
‘My _emotions?’_  
  
‘We came to this planet to find you,’ Seunghyun says. ‘To save your lives, at risk to our own. We’ve lost half our crew. We’re not here to kill you. We crashed, like you. We didn’t choose to be here’.  
  
‘It doesn’t matter’.  
  
‘Why not?’ Seunghyun asks. ‘What are you afraid of?’  
  
The man’s eyes dart to Jiyong and Jiyong frowns. He has to weigh up his response. He could kill everyone on this base before any of them laid a hand on him. He doesn’t _say_ that. Seunghyun shoots him a look and Jiyong knows he has to play a wounded animal. He has to submit and become unassuming. Innocuous. He has to put this quivering, sweaty man at ease.  
  
‘I’m injured,’ Jiyong replies quietly. ‘I’m tired. I’m weak. I want to get off this planet. You’re our best shot at getting a message out. I’m not going to hurt you. None of us are. We don’t kill people for fun. I’m not a sociopath’.  
  
The man hesitates, not because these few words have turned him around, but because his arm is growing tired. It drops before he lifts it again. He can’t hold the scalpel much longer. Unexpectedly, Seunghyun simply reaches out and takes it from him. He puts it back on the tray and grips the man by the shoulder.  
  
‘You and I have been getting along,’ Seunghyun says. ‘You know me well enough. _He’s_ my partner. We want to help you. We want to help _all_ of you. It’s in our best interests to make sure you get whatever you need to send a message out. For the rest of our time here, we’re at your service’.  
  
The man grimaces, pained by Seunghyun’s heavy hand.  
  
‘But if you _do_ petition the others to boot us from this habitat, you’ll find yourself outside without a helmet, looking at my smiling face through the airlock window. Okay?’  
  
Jiyong barely suppresses the smile tugging at his lips. When Brandt frantically looks in his direction, Jiyong looks penitent and demure. He tries to strike an unassuming figure.

 

  
  
*

  
  
  
When the rest of the scientists re-enter the hab, Seunghyun introduces Jiyong to each of them and tells them point-blank who they are, and what they do for a living. Half of them have never heard of the _Firestarter_ , and the ones who had find the information irrelevant. Brandt perspires in the corner for the whole of it, eyes frantically darting to and fro, in disbelief that his comrades aren’t forming a lynch mob.  
  
Jiyong almost feels sorry for the man. He wonder what he was like before he was stranded on a frontier planet with no current means of escape. Perhaps being in this situation has cracked his brain. He is over-emotional and irrational. The rest of them are the opposite. If anything, they seem to appreciate the unique skills he and Seunghyun possess. With extra hands put to work, they can expedite their efforts to communicate through the atmosphere.  
  
Still, Jiyong does his best to steer clear of Brandt.  
  
As for Rani and Zelenetsky, Jiyong sees almost nothing of them. Rani seems to be studiously avoiding him, so he doesn’t have the chance to get a read on him, and Zelenetsky is out of sorts at Okafor’s loss. They were friends for a decade. For now, Jiyong understands and leaves him alone. What could they really talk about? Their impending deaths?

 

* * *

 

 

  
His first night out of the infirmary is sleepless and the second, mostly the same. With the habitat at double capacity, everyone has to double up. It means he and Seunghyun have to share a single bed, which would be tolerable in an ordinary situation—but with a cracked collarbone and a broken wrist, makes things considerably harder.  
  
Still, he is grateful they can be together. He is grateful one of the scientists on the base sacrificed his room for them to share. Without it, he would already be bouncing off the walls. The habitat is small and claustrophobic. The crew quarters are worse. They are like prison cells, but smaller. Seunghyun tries to mitigate his discomfort and irritation.  
  
‘I have something for you?’  
  
‘What is it?’  
  
Jiyong holds out his hand and studies the small box Seunghyun places in his palm. It is a simulation.  
  
‘What is this?’  
  
‘I made it for you before the accident,’ Seunghyun says. ‘I guess you don’t remember. I edited old sims from the library and made a new one for you. I modelled it off your Paradise sim. I did the best I could. I managed to save it from the wreck’.  
  
‘You _made_ me a sim?’  
  
Jiyong’s heart softens. It is such a kind gesture. Seunghyun never approved of sims. He never took comfort in them. He wouldn’t use them. He’s only ever tolerated Jiyong’s predilection for them. Despite that, he _made_ one for him, based on the Paradise sim? The one most meaningful to him. The one that let him dream another life was possible?  
  
Seunghyun frowns and sits on the small bunk beside him.  
  
‘I hoped your memories would come back from the past few weeks’.  
  
‘Me too. Sorry If I’ve forgotten things that were important’.  
  
‘There’s nothing big,’ Seunghyun answers. ‘It’s just weird. This has never happened before. We’ve never had a problem like this that couldn’t be fixed. I can’t help you. I don’t like that’.  
  
‘I’m only missing a few weeks. It’s no big deal’.  
  
Jiyong kisses Seunghyun and lingers. He rests his forehead against Seunghyun’s, feeling his warm breath on his cheek. It makes the grim reality unfolding around them seem far away. He pulls back with a smile.  
  
‘Can I try this?’ he asks, holding up the simulation.  
  
‘Yeah. If this isn’t time for an escape, when is?’  
  
‘What about you?’  
  
_‘You’re_ my escape’.  
  
Jiyong cups Seunghyun’s cheek and smiles.  
  
‘Thank-you’.  
  
Seunghyun nods and takes the box while Jiyong puts the nodes on either side of his forehead. Slowly at first and then in a cascade, the small room they are in peels away. A street shimmers into existence around him, familiar to him in an eerie way. He gets the feeling of déjà vu, like he has been here before. He recognises the structure of the landscape as an old western simulation, but Seunghyun has stripped it back to its basic components and rebuilt it to match the Paradise demo. There is greenery. There is grass lining the street. There are trees and a smattering of sand beneath his feet. If he stands still and closes his eyes he can hear water in the distance. He feels a breeze on his skin and lists forward.  
  
‘Careful,’ Seunghyun says from outside.  
  
‘Wow, this is something’.  
  
Jiyong moves forward slowly. He walks up the street, stopping every few feet to marvel at something new. It isn’t as complex as the Paradise simulation, but Seunghyun has done a good job. There are flowers that seem real—that sway in the breeze and shed petals. They have no smell but that doesn’t matter. Smells are difficult and complex. The illusion without them, is still so real.  
  
Part way up the street, Jiyong begins to recognise where he is. He passes the place where the shuttle usually stops in the demo; its passengers unloaded in the neighbourhood by the home he can never enter. Only this time, he isn’t being forced ahead. He isn’t part of a storyline that propels him. He can take his time alone. He isn’t harangued by a sales pitch. There is nobody around. It is everything he ever wanted from the Paradise demo. Peace and quiet. Room to breathe and daydream. A foundation from which he could build a fantasy life.  
  
_‘Wow’._  
  
He approaches the house at the end of the street and sighs. It is a perfect replica of the house on Paradise. There is detail here and painstaking work. More than anywhere else, Seunghyun has focussed his energies here. He has built every part of this home to exacting specifications. He has captured the grass and the flowers, and the tree with the swing. There are oranges on the ground by the side of the house, some fresh and round, others dimpled. Unseen birds chirp in the trees all around them. Jiyong comes to the gate and stops.  
  
‘You built the house,’ he whispers. ‘It’s _perfect_ ’.  
  
‘Go inside’.  
  
‘I can go in?’  
  
Jiyong falters at the gate. In this part of the Paradise demo, the simulation would end. Sheets of blue would peel around him and this world would disappear. Each time, the return was painful. It makes him hesitant now but Seunghyun encourages him so Jiyong takes a step over the threshold and waits. He waits and nothing happens. The grass remains. The flowers sway. The faint sound of water is still present. For the first time, he has made it past the boundary fence.  
  
From here, he makes it quickly to the front door and enters before he can second guess himself. He finds himself in a room so bright and open, it is completely unfamiliar to him. There is so much space to move around. He stretches his arms open wide and turns in a circle—touching nothing, bumping nothing. Stretching in the simulation makes him resentful of his physical body outside it, with his braced shoulders and cracked collarbone. If he stretched out his arms in the real world, he would knock a wall. Here, in the simulation, this single room is half the size of the six-man habitat they inhabit. He breathes deeply and savours the illusion of openness and freedom.  
  
On a small table beside him, he sees an old book. His heart pangs.  
  
‘My book. Did it survive the crash?’  
  
‘No’.  
  
Jiyong frowns and his heart aches. In the simulation, he touches the soft cover of the book he has kept close to him for ten years. A book priceless for its sentimental value, gone now—forever. Only Seunghyun has captured it here perfectly. Jiyong opens the book and finds the message on the inside page exactly where it should be. _‘So dear I love him, that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life’._  
  
‘It’s exactly the same’.  
  
‘It’s important to you,’ Seunghyun answers knowingly. ‘I wanted this sim to feel like a home. What kind of fantasy would it be if it didn’t?’  
  
Jiyong looks up now and scans the rest of the room. As he moves in further, he runs his fingers over soft furniture. Over textiles and wood; things he has scarcely felt in his life. Though the house is constructed from glass and metal, the inside is full of natural materials. Things you could only find on places like Paradise. There are photo frames placed in each corner of the room. In each, there is a picture of them together. The highlight reel of their life. It makes Jiyong’s heart ache. Is this what life could be like? This peace and quiet? This simple pleasure?  
  
In the kitchen, there is a mix of luxurious foods he has only ever heard about, and every simpler food he has enjoyed. Everything he has ever tasted and found joy in—Seunghyun has remembered them all and painstakingly created these imitations.  
  
Scattered around the living space are other objects from their past; old jackets thrown over chairs, mementos picked up on missions. Anything either of them have ever held onto for any length of time. Anything they have ever truly owned, is here. It must have taken Seunghyun months to pull this off. For him to remember these things in such exacting detail.  
  
‘How did you do this? How did you recreate all these things?’ Jiyong asks, running his fingers over a coat Seunghyun used to own until it wore thin and fell apart. ‘I remember all these things. This coat? It’s exactly as I remember’.  
  
‘I’ve got good memory’.  
  
‘You’re sentimental’.  
  
Seunghyun laughs at the suggestion. It is a joke in a lot of ways. Seunghyun is pragmatic. Jiyong is too, but he is more openly sentimental. He supposes Seunghyun is too, he just conceals it better. He only lets it out in key moments. It makes moments like this more meaningful. They tug at his heart-strings for their rarity.  
  
‘Go into the bedroom,’ Seunghyun says.  
  
Jiyong navigates his way into the bedroom and pauses in the doorway. A long time ago now, a million years ago, he lay with Seunghyun in a painfully hard bed, in a brothel’s rented room, on a dusty asteroid, and closed his eyes. With his head on Seunghyun’s chest, he described in exacting detail a better room than the one they were in. Aching and exhausted from a tough job, Jiyong described a bed so soft it could lull them to sleep. As he ran his thumb in circles over Seunghyun’s bicep, he talked about sheets that were thin and silky and cool. He described a blanket, light like a cloud. He described white curtains over the windows and a vertical garden on the wall. In his fantasy, there were open windows guiding a soft breeze over their bodies. He described it all. The more he spoke, the more it seemed like they could be in that other place. It kept the blood out of their minds eye. It helped them get to sleep.  
  
Now, here--- everything he described on that day, exists in this simulation.  
  
_‘Seunghyun’._  
  
‘Lay down’.  
  
Jiyong tentatively approaches the bed and sinks down onto the mattress. It sags beneath his weight and folds around him like a warm hug. He lies down with a guarded smile. It’s everything he hoped. He could never _really_ imagine it. He had never felt real softness before. He had never felt cool sheets that didn’t scratch at his skin. This simulacrum of comfort is the next best thing. It feels real, almost.  
  
Something flickers into existence in front of him and he bolts upright, startled.  
  
‘It’s okay,’ Seunghyun says knowingly from outside.  
  
Jiyong gapes down at the body now on the bed with him. He looks down on Seunghyun’s sleeping face, untroubled. He has put himself into the simulation. A version of himself anyway. Himself, the way he was on that asteroid. It is unsettling and eerie, but Jiyong finds himself lying back down, curious about the imitation. With a hand beneath his head, he scrutinises this unreal Seunghyun. The resemblance is uncanny. His chest rises and falls. His eyes flicker beneath closed lids. He is asleep and dreaming. Jiyong reaches out with a tentative hand and holds his finger beneath this Seunghyun’s nose. A warm huff of air touches his skin and he pulls his hand back, surprised.  
  
‘It’s so real,’ Jiyong whispers. ‘Why did you make a simulation of yourself?’  
  
‘I wanted you to have the fantasy somewhere. Even if it’s not real’.  
  
Jiyong smiles and brushes an errant hair from imitation-Seunghyun’s sleeping face.  
  
‘It’s not the same’.  
  
He hears Seunghyun chuckle on the outside and Jiyong pulls himself from the bed. He allows himself a few moments to watch Seunghyun’s sleeping face. This Seunghyun is at peace. He is unburdened. He has never been maimed or murdered. He has never known loss. He is a fantasy. Still, it’s nice. The real Seunghyun made this for him so he could fantasize and it is good for that. This does allow him to dream.  
  
‘What are you dreaming about, do you know?’ Jiyong asks.  
  
The Seunghyun on the outside sighs, thinking.  
  
‘I don’t know. I rarely dream’.  
  
‘That’s sad’.  
  
‘What do _you_ dream about?’  
  
‘You,’ Jiyong answers honestly. ‘Me. Things that don’t exist. Things we deserve’.  
  
‘Are they good things or bad things?’  
  
‘Both’.  
  
Jiyong shakes himself out of his reveries and makes his way back through the house and out into the yard. He is overwhelmed by the house and its contents. He knows there are a thousand things he has missed in his walkthrough. He will have to come back a dozen times over to uncover all the small intricacies Seunghyun has included. For now, he needs a minute to breathe. He finds himself at the side of the house by the orange tree, staring at oranges lying in the grass. He would give anything to taste a real orange.  
  
He and Seunghyun have had black market fruit, but it’s ersatz. Reproduced base pair by base pair, ersatz fruit has a dullness to it. Real fruit doesn’t exist anymore. Nowhere in the universe is there a real orange now.  
  
There is a thunderous crack to the left of him. He turns, shocked, looking down the long street leading up to the house. In the distance, he sees something. It reminds him of an oncoming storm but it’s smaller than that. It’s contained. It moves in an erratic way and crackles with light. The world around him darkens. He takes a step forward, towards it, drawn by a low sound; a thrumming that he can feel on his skin. It makes the hairs on his arms stand up.  
  
He moves closer to it. The dark cloud is coming towards him. As it grows bigger in his vision, he can see it more clearly. He can _hear_ it. It is like a condensed electrical storm. The closer it gets to him, the more he feels it on his skin. It has the sharpness of needles. It is mesmerising in its rawness. It draws him in.  
  
Suddenly, it seems to transport itself. In an instant, it has traversed the street between them and is only feet away. It towers over him. Sparks of light flick out from its centre and crack and whine. The thrum is so loud it almost deafens him. Pain pierces his eardrums. It’s unbearable. He tries to turn his back on it. The cloud groans. He feels the vibrations in every part of his body, rattling his cells.  
  
Around him, the world begins to shake. An orange rolls from behind him and comes to a stop by his foot. As Jiyong looks down at it, the cloud releases a noise so sickening and painful it feels like his head will crack in two. He physically crumples, slumping to the ground, on his side. He feels grass against his cheek. He tries to pull the nodes from his head to end the simulation but he can’t move. On the ground, he sees the base of the cloud so close to him he could reach out and touch it. It groans, like it’s speaking to him---  
  
And then it peels away.  
  
Again, he’s in the small bunk on the habitat with Seunghyun above him, his hands on his face, shouting something indiscernible. Seunghyun is panicked. Jiyong doesn’t know why. He can’t make sense of what is going on. He is staring at the ceiling. His stomach lurches. He was just somewhere else and now? His head is fuzzy. Seunghyun’s emotional words are muffled, but they become clearer with time, as his head clears.  
  
Someone joins Seunghyun above him, obscuring his vision.  
  
_‘He had a seizure. Help me get him to the infirmary’._

  
A seizure? Jiyong thinks. That can’t be right. Then he feels Seunghyun’s arms beneath him, hauling him off the floor and he knows he wasn’t supposed to be on the ground, so _maybe_. But there was something there, wasn’t there? In the simulation. There was a glitch.

  
  
  
  
  
*

  
  
‘I’m fine’.  
  
‘I don’t know what happened. I tested the sim myself before I gave it to you. I thought it might have been damaged in the crash so I checked it, but it was _fine._ I never would have given it to you if—’  
  
‘Seunghyun,’ Jiyong answers. ‘I’m fine. It just zapped me or something’.  
  
‘Zapped you? You didn’t hear the scream that came out of you. You slipped off the bed before I could grab you. You had a _seizure_. Fuck---’  
  
‘I’m _fine’._  
  
Jiyong reaches for the hands covering Seunghyun’s face and pulls them back so they’re looking at one another. Whatever happened wasn’t Seunghyun’s fault. The sim was working fine up until it wasn’t. There was no way to predict a problem. Shit happens. More than anything, he doesn’t want this incident to prevent him from using the simulation again. Now that he has some distance from it, he desperately wants to go back. He wants to be in that open place surrounded by things he recognises. He wants to be in that place Seunghyun painstakingly made for him.  
  
‘What you did in there?’ Jiyong whispers. ‘What you made? It was incredible. It was beautiful. I don’t know how you did it. I love it’  
  
‘Yeah well, I wasn’t trying to kill you when I started’.  
  
‘It was just a _glitch’._  
  
‘I’ll try and figure it out,’ Seunghyun frowns. ‘I’ll try and fix it’.  
  
‘ _Please,_ ’ Jiyong smiles. ‘I loved it. I can’t wait to go back’.  
  
He pulls Seunghyun’s hand in and kisses the back of it.  
  
‘Can I get off this bed now? I’m sick of being in this fucking infirmary’.

  
  
  
  
* * *

 

 

 

Over the next few days, Jiyong is aimless. Seunghyun tinkers with his simulation, trying to discover what went wrong, which leaves him with little to do himself. Rani continues to avoid him, which is impressive in a space so small. He must spend half his time in the bunk he shares with Zelenetsky, because Jiyong gets claustrophobic in his and has to while away time in shared spaces. He sits in the tiny mess and reads or hovers over the shoulders of the scientists. Most of the time, it’s bearable. At any one moment, there are usually three people outside the habitat, adjusting solar panels to chase the distant rays of the nearest star, adjusting experiments etc. That leaves more breathing room inside.  
  
He volunteers for every task but can’t be useful until his collarbone heals, and his wrist too. Three more weeks and he should be back on track. After that, he might have a whole month of strength to enjoy before they all start killing each other as resources run low.  
  
As time drags on, most of the scientists grow used to him. Brandt is the only one with a grudge, and Jiyong simply ignores his rapid shifts between silent and outwardly confrontational. The rest of them let him hover. They include him in their work. They seem glad to have someone to explain their science to. They are glad of an audience.  
  
He is in one of the two small labs one morning, fending off boredom and the feeling of uselessness that being injured gives him, when things go awry. After a dull two hours checking meteorological data, a monitor close to him starts beeping in alarm. A red-light flashes, sending a circuitous streak of red flicking around it like the hands of a clock. It’s a warning siren. The two scientists ahead of him straighten. Their hands speed across their consoles.  
  
‘What is it?’ Jiyong asks.  
  
‘I don’t know,’ one answers. ‘A storm?’  
  
‘How far is it? How strong?’  
  
‘Not strong, but it’s closing in quickly. I don’t understand. The winds out there don’t account for this speed. It came out of nowhere. It will be on top of us in ninety seconds.’  
  
‘Will it do any damage?’  
  
‘It shouldn’t’.  
  
‘It’s electrical,’ the second says.  
  
‘What?’  
  
The first scientist pushes his chair to the other’s console to check the readouts and they both look at each other in amazement. Jiyong understands implicitly that, like the aurora’s and every other so far unexplainable phenomenon on this planet, an electrical storm shouldn’t be happening.  
  
He moves to the window and stares out into the grey, barren landscape stretching out from the habitat. It has been a while since he’s seen the middle of a planetary storm, even a small one. There is beauty to them when you’re safe. He wants to see it. The excitement from the scientists makes his heart pound. It makes witnessing it irresistible. An impossible storm? It excites him.  
  
‘Forty seconds,’ the first says. ‘Can you see anything?’  
  
Jiyong squints, manoeuvring in the small window to get a better view.  
  
‘Nothing yet’.  
  
_‘Thirty-five’._  
  
A small patch of darkness enters Jiyong’s vision far in the distance, but the second he recognises a change in colour- it has grown exponentially larger, it is travelling so quickly. The speed of it startles him.  
  
_‘Thirty’._  
  
Jiyong feels an ache in his stomach. He feels a tension he can’t place. The hairs on his arms stand up. The storm grows and he can start to make out the crackle of light within it—contained explosions. A small lightening storm.  
  
_‘Twenty’._  
  
Jiyong watches it approach, and as it draws nearer, he recognises it. He feels a lurch in his gut. It isn’t a storm at all—at least not one that makes sense. He has seen this before, three days ago in Seunghyun’s simulation. It’s the same thing. It’s the exact same thing. The second realisation dawns, the cloud makes a sound so loud they all hear it from inside the habitat. It is the sound a ship makes as it breaks apart from external pressure. It is a cavernous sound. It is _frightening_. Jiyong winces and turns his head from it and the budding pain in his eardrum’s ceases.  
  
‘It’s gone,’ the second scientist says, alarmed. ‘What happened to it? It just disappeared’.  
  
Jiyong presses his face closer to the plastic of the window and a quiet breath shudders out of him at the empty landscape.  
  
_‘What the fuck?’_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pls check out [this gorgeous art](https://top-nyong.tumblr.com/post/178192512185/you-know-when-i-cant-sleep-i-sometimes-turn) for the last chapter by martythegirl . I really died.


	4. Sine Qua Non

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry I haven't updated in so long. I've had some personal matters going on that have made it impossible for me to sit down and write, but I finally had some time this week where I was able to decompress and It was nice to write something again. 
> 
> A/N : There is some violence in this chapter.

  
  
  
  
The light falls across Seunghyun’s sleeping face in a way that accentuates his features. He looks handsome. Maybe it’s the glow of being without stress for a change. Jiyong reaches out and brushes the hair from his eyes. Seunghyun slowly rouses and smiles when he wakes.  
  
‘Good Morning’.  
  
‘Good Morning back’.  
  
Seunghyun rolls onto his back and stretches his arms out above him before turning his head.  
  
‘Did you sleep well?’  
  
‘Very,’ Jiyong answers, smiling. ‘My sleep was perfect’.  
  
Seunghyun looks so pleased with this answer, he claps his hands together in satisfaction.  
  
‘So, what are we doing to celebrate? What’s for breakfast?’  
  
Jiyong mulls over a lifetime of scraps, rations and imitation food. If he could have anything in the universe to eat, what would he have? What would complement a perfect morning like this one, with the sun shining through the open windows and a light breeze rolling over their bodies? If this were real, he would probably forego breakfast altogether. They would stay in bed and make love. But this isn’t real, so he continues the fantasy. He creates a wholesome scenario of simple childlike innocence.  
  
‘Some fruit,’ he answers. ‘Real fruit. And some meat. You choose which’.  
  
Seunghyun rolls to face him and lays his palm up between them. Jiyong intertwines their fingers. It doesn’t feel quite solid, but it’s close enough. There’s a suggestion of warmth.  
  
‘I want a steak,’ Seunghyun answers. ‘Can you have steak for breakfast?’  
  
‘Of course. I’ll kill a cow right now if that’s what you want’.  
  
Seunghyun smiles and closes his eyes.  
  
‘In a few minutes maybe. Let me wake up. For now, it’s nice being here with you. Maybe we can stay here a little longer. It’s nice, right?’  
  
‘Yeah, it is. It’s peaceful’.  
  
Seunghyun opens his eyes.  
  
‘I love you’.  
  
‘Me too’.  
  
  
  
  
_‘What are you doing?_ _’  
  
  
_  
  
Rani’s voice enters the room like a hammer to the skull. It is so disorienting and unexpected, Jiyong jolts upright, still caught in the sim. It takes him a moment to step back into the real world mentally. He pulls the nodes from his head and the simulation disappears around him. Instead, he is in the habitat with Rani standing in his small doorway.  
  
‘You can’t knock?’  
  
‘I could,’ Rani answers, in a way that implies he won’t.  
  
Jiyong does his best to ignore those instincts calling for him to punch this kid. He swings his legs over the side of the bed, masking the pain it causes him. Seunghyun couldn’t find any glitches in the sim so he reluctantly returned it, as long as Jiyong promised to stay in the house where it was glitch-free last time. Jiyong dutifully promised to avoid a sudden and mysterious seizure. He is glad for the entertainment. Injured, he has few ways of being useful. His ineptitude grates on his nerves.  As a distraction, he immersed himself in Seunghyun’s sim and headed straight for the bed. The simulacrum of Seunghyun shimmered into life beside him. Jiyong wanted to wake up with him. The real Seunghyun left hours ago to help tinker with equipment outside.  
  
Jiyong slumps with jealousy and pain runs through his shoulder. The different stimuli caused by the sims mute his pain. Here in the real world, he feels it in full. It is part of why he can’t go outside with the others. The suits are tight, like a second skin. They aren’t pressurised. Made of special materials, they are designed to accommodate tears so you have more time to patch a hole before suffering any serious consequences. The brace on his wrist and shoulder make squeezing into a skin-tight suit impossible.  
  
‘Any news from the scientists about the storm?’ Jiyong asks.  
  
‘Not yet’.  
  
He tries not to call the people in this habitat by their names. He wants to be involved in their work because it’s in his best interests but there is little chance of rescue. Resources will thin and when they do, people will make desperate choices. He might have to kill some of these people in self-defence. It will be easier if he maintains distance. Easier for them.  
  
It has been two days since the micro-storm from Seunghyun’s simulation appeared outside the habitat and disappeared. Ever since, the scientists have been re-tooling their diagnostic equipment. There’s no logical explanation for what they saw and heard. He understands the basics of storm fronts and the variations found in space but they all exist within known science. A sudden electrical storm that can appear and vanish in an instant is beyond his experience. This planet has no axial tilt so there are no variations in season. No sudden changes. No sudden heat. Even if there were seasons, they are too far from the nearest star to be significant. The median temperature is steady. There shouldn’t be any jet streams either to account for its speed.  
  
He didn’t tell anyone he’s seen and heard it before. He’s never doubted his own mind, but what other explanation is there? He made a mistake. The brain detects patterns and similarities to make sense of things it doesn’t understand. That’s what happened. The glitch in Seunghyun’s sim caused a shock to his brain. When the storm appeared outside the habitat, his brain made a connection to make sense of past trauma. They weren't the same thing.  
  
‘Where I’m from, people have this saying, _creatio ex nihilo_ ,’ Rani says simply.  
  
Jiyong is taken aback. It takes time to translate this in his head.  
  
‘ _Creation out of nothing,’_ he says. ‘That’s a dead earth language’.  
  
‘Yeah. I guess it was a throwback to another time. It was the colony motto. We took minerals from the rock and created something out of nothing. A lot of mining colonies have the same slogan, I think. It’s kind of appropriate here, no?’  
  
‘The storm didn’t come from nothing. There’s an explanation,’ Jiyong shrugs. ‘They just haven’t figured it out yet’.  
  
‘I don’t know that they will. They seem a little incompetent, all things considered’.  
  
Jiyong smiles.  
  
‘You would know’.  
  
Rani smiles caustically.  
  
‘Wow, you lost all memory of me and you’re still being a prick. A sour relationship. It must be fate’.  
  
‘Must be. What do you want?’  
  
Rani folds his arms and leans against the doorframe. He nods to the box on the bed.  
  
‘You spend a lot of time in sims. Why?’  
  
‘It’s none of your business’.  
  
‘This habitat is so small, I hear everything that goes on,’ Rani answers. ‘Every sneeze, whisper and groan. We’re all each other’s business now. It is funny,’ he continues. ‘I spent my life on a colony. I took personal space for granted. I thought working in space would be a big adventure, you know? Cramped quarters on a ship were fine because the excitement would make it all worthwhile,’ he says. ‘But now I’m stuck in this hole with you people until we get rescued and it’s driving me crazy. I could use a sim. Something set on a colony maybe’.  
  
‘Mine’s not for sale’.  
  
Rani laughs quietly.  
  
‘What’s the deal?’ he asks. ‘Even on the ship you spent half your time in sims. More than most people. Why? Trying to escape your other half?’  
  
‘What?’  
  
‘Before we crashed, you told me about Seunghyun. You made it seem like a real special thing between you two,’ he says. ‘But you spend half your life in sims away from him. I’d take it personally, if it were me’.  
  
Jiyong grinds his teeth and slips a foot into one of his boots. It’s difficult to tie the laces but he refuses to show weakness. He maintains an un-pained, easy expression. Only his irritation shows through. He has barely spoken to this kid but Seunghyun said they didn’t get along and Jiyong believes it. His memory is gone, but he must feel the remnants of dislike in the back of his brain.  
  
‘He understands’.  
  
‘Understands what? That you’d rather spend your time in a fantasy than with him in the real world? You could use the sims together but you don’t. You’re always alone’.  
  
‘That’s not how it is’.  
  
‘How is it?’  
  
‘I _need_ them,’ Jiyong snaps. ‘They’re like meditation’.  
  
‘Escapism’.  
  
Jiyong’s jaw clenches and he forgets his boots, letting the laces drop. He takes a minute to compose himself. Who the fuck is this kid? He made a choice not to kill anyone in the habitat except in self-defence but he’s changing his mind.  
  
‘You and I talked before the crash, huh?’ Jiyong asks. ‘What else did I say to you?’  
  
‘You told me to _fuck off_ a lot’.  
  
‘This must be déjà vu’.  
  
Rani smirks.  
  
‘I just think it’s a little sad’.  
  
Jiyong scoffs bitterly. This kid can’t understand the depths of suffering he and Seunghyun have endured. They both deal with their trauma in different ways but Seunghyun understands why he uses the sims, like Jiyong understands why Seunghyun doesn’t. Seunghyun is pragmatic. He needs to have control over the world around him. He has the technical ability to live in a fantasy for the rest of his life. On Earth, the holo-technology he perfected to keep his underground home hidden was minor compared to what he was capable of. In the beginning, Jiyong questioned why he didn’t do more with his gift. If Seunghyun needed control, a sim was the perfect opportunity to craft the universe to his specific needs. But for Seunghyun—that wasn’t control. Spending time in a sim meant he lost control in the real world. They were a distraction. For practical reasons, it was never safe to close your eyes. Going into a sim that left you blind and almost deaf was more than he could risk. It was a survival instinct he couldn’t shake.  
  
As for his own reasons--- well, it was Seunghyun who encouraged him to use sims in the first place. Seunghyun used a sim to save his life.  
  
‘Did I tell you how Seunghyun and I escaped Earth?’  
  
‘No,’ Rani says disinterestedly.  
  
‘We stole a ship from a cartel. From the Southern State’.  
  
Rani’s brow lifts in surprise. The Southern State are still the biggest cartel in the solar system. Their reach dwindles in the outer limits, but there isn’t a rock anywhere that doesn’t have some tie or connection. They hold a monopoly on arms production and every drug on every asteroid has their stamp on it.  
  
‘I was on their payroll. I did hits for them,’ Jiyong says. ‘Politicians. Low level gangs. Members of opposing cartels. I did hundreds of jobs in the two years I worked for them’.  
  
‘You were in the Southern State?’  
  
‘Not exactly.’ Jiyong answers. ‘They wanted to kill me. I killed one of theirs in self-defence but they couldn’t get close enough to return the favour. Seunghyun’s hideaway, where we lived, was too well-hidden for them to sneak up on me, and no-one wanted to get close enough to kill me in the open. At that point, no-one knew how I did what I did. They didn’t understand how the formula worked. They still don’t. Rumours travel. All people knew about me is that I could light them up with a glance. It was like magic to those people. Ignorance and fear kept me alive. So, the cartel reached out and made me a deal. They hired me as a contractor’.  
  
‘Oh’.  
  
Rani’s interest is piqued. His youthful disdain thins because he wants to hear the story.  
  
‘Every now and then, I’d hear things,’ Jiyong says. ‘Rumours of the cartel’s plans, usually drug deals or smuggling operations. Sometimes I would hear about the where and when. I always fantasized about stealing a cartel ship and getting off the planet with Seunghyun. It was the only realistic way. Regular airfields were too well guarded. The normal flight routes were monitored. Even if we got our hands on a ship, we would have been shot out of the sky. The only way to get off was on an illegal ship, on an illegal route’.  
  
Almost all the air traffic departing Earth came from the domes. It was exceedingly difficult to leave the planet from a ship on the outside. There was no way to do it alone. It was impossible.  
  
‘After a few years of doing hits, I was given a job from the second in charge personally,’ Jiyong frowns. ‘He wanted me to kill the head of the Southern State. I said no, but he and a dozen other high-ranking members convinced me that the power grab was inevitable. They offered twenty times my regular pay and let me know if I refused, they would kill me either way. So, I took the job’.  
  
Rani pales at the suggestion. The Southern State are a formidable power in most of the system second only to the government and mining corporations. To kill the head is unthinkable. Like the Hydra, more would take his place.  
  
‘What happened?’  
  
‘The head of the cartel was waiting for me. He knew about the coup. He was prepared. He had fifty men protecting him. I barely got out alive. I was hurt bad,’ Jiyong says. ‘I couldn’t reach Seunghyun. I couldn’t get to a safe place. I was too injured. I was bleeding too heavily. If I ran, I would have left a trail of blood. So, I stumbled my way into some ruins nearby and I hid. I didn’t want them to find my body. They would have cut my head off and nailed it to a wall. I didn’t want Seunghyun to ever see that. I hid as best I could. I expected to die’.  
  
Like it happened yesterday, the memory floods back to him like a simulation peeling away the walls of the habitat. He can feel the stifling heat on his skin. The humidity that day was intense. It plastered his hair and clothes to his skin. The sweat stung his eyes and the rain smelled like ozone. It was acidic. It burned the inside of his nostrils. It seldom rained on Earth, but it rained that day. The kind of rain that ate away everything that wasn’t steel or concrete. Outside the domes, people relied on makeshift structures and the ruins of old cities for shelter. Rain meant people had to rebuild. If it touched your skin, it would burn you.  
  
‘Thankfully,’ Jiyong says carefully, ‘It rained. It washed away my blood trail. They couldn’t find me’.  
  
They came close. He stumbled into the yard of an abandoned building that had collapsed and he slid beneath a fallen wall. The space was so tight, the concrete above him touched his nose when he moved. Shielded from direct rain, rivulets still trickled downhill toward him and burned his back through his clothes. Over time it eroded the material. Fibres burned themselves into his skin. With the cartel on his trail, he had no choice but to stay where he was. He simply closed his eyes and tried to dissociate from the pain.  
  
When the rain later cleared, his pursuers caught up to him. Lying there with a hand pressed to his wound, he heard footsteps and turned his head. He saw several pairs of boots only feet away. Weak from blood-loss, he couldn’t hear what they were saying but their voices signalled death. They made him cold. The closest boot stopped two feet from the slab he lay beneath.  
  
Eventually, they moved on but he couldn’t risk moving or making his escape. There was every chance their withdrawal was a trap. He had to be sure.  
  
‘I spent three days lying under a concrete slab with an open wound that should have killed me before I thought it was safe enough to get to one of Seunghyun’s doors. To get back into one of the tunnels.’  
  
He barely made it. Seunghyun had alarms set up that signalled the second anything crossed one of his holographic doors, so when Jiyong stumbled through the most remote of them, taking a circuitous route to avoid being followed, Seunghyun found him the second he crossed the threshold. Eyes closed for half the trip, slipping in and out of consciousness, Jiyong was so weak he felt dead already. The second he felt the barrier at his back, he collapsed in the tunnel. He was only awake long enough to hear Seunghyun’s voice. Then, he coughed and blood ran down his chin. It was lights out.  
  
He woke up days later, dripping with sweat. Seunghyun had done his best to keep him alive. He had sewn him up then second guessed himself and cauterised the wound for good measure. He had put salves on the burns on his back and the backs of his arms. He had found fresh water, a rare commodity, and tried to clean him up. Still, it was touch and go. It took weeks for him to get back on his feet and even then, he wasn’t right. He wouldn’t be right until a year later when he next entered a revival machine.  
  
‘How did you survive? Did you have access to a machine?’  
  
‘Not anymore. They shot me in the stomach. It went clean through but I lost a lot of blood. Seunghyun disinfected the wound and stitched me up but beyond that? All he could do was pray. With the cartel, I had access to a machine but I was a dead man walking after that. I had betrayed them. I was enemy number one. It wasn’t safe to leave the tunnels for supplies. It was up to fate’.  
  
‘You’re lucky’.  
  
‘Yeah’.  
  
‘After that, you stole one of their ships?’  
  
‘Before everything went wrong, I heard about a job coming a few weeks later. A small ship smuggling arms out on a certain date at a certain time. I knew that was our last chance. We _had_ to get off Earth. If we stayed, it was just a matter of time before they caught up to me. It was our last chance to get access to a ship. The routes and locations changed each time. If we didn’t get on that ship, there wouldn’t be another one’.  
  
‘But you were injured’.  
  
‘Yeah, but I was well enough to walk and shoot a gun. We had to try,’ Jiyong says. ‘And we got lucky. The attempted coup had caused friction in the cartel. The head and the second were fighting for control so the Southern State was fractured. They were sloppy. Seunghyun hacked one of their terminals and no-one noticed. He sent misdirected messages to different ranking members of the cartel to sow tension. On the day the ship was set to leave, it was guarded by half the number it should have been. Once there, Seunghyun set up a dampening field. He blocked communications across the whole block so when things got hairy, they couldn’t call for help. We did the best we could to increase our chances’.  
  
‘What happened? You snuck aboard?’  
  
‘We thought about it. It was our easiest plan. But when we got there, there were still too many men on the airfield and the ship was too small and too well guarded. There was no way to quietly slip on board’.  
  
‘So you fought? A cartel? How many were there?’  
  
‘Two dozen?’  
  
‘And?’ Rani presses. ‘What happened?’  
  
‘I killed them,’ Jiyong shrugs.  
  
Rani waits eagerly for more graphic detail but Jiyong doesn’t give any.  
  
‘What, that’s it? That’s the end of the story? _I killed them?_ How? You against twenty members of a cartel? There’s no way. Especially injured. How did you do it? The formula? You set the place on fire?’  
  
Jiyong frowns, remembering.  
  
‘I wanted to do it quietly. Methodically. I wanted to pick them off. I killed two or three on the perimeter, but Seunghyun tripped an alarm. He got caught’.  
  
‘What happened?’  
  
‘They dragged him into the middle of the tarmac. They held a gun to the back of his head’.  
  
_‘And?’_  
_  
  
_

 

**\-- FLASHBACK --**

  
  
He presses his shoulder against the fence and holds his breath, willing his pounding heart into a normal rhythm. He watches Seunghyun’s knees hit the tarmac on the other side of the fence. He is thirty metres away, out of reach. Three men surround Seunghyun. One presses the muzzle of a gun against the back of his head.  
  
Jiyong's grip tightens on his own gun, taken from the body of a guard. In a crouch, he rests his weight against the fence. Through a crack, he watches the men circling Seunghyun like vultures, discussing his fate. If they are talking, that's good. He still has time. He can save him. He takes a deep breath to focus and empties the clip of the gun into his palm with shaking fingers. A bullet hits the ground with a small _ting_. He waits with baited-breath for the tiny sound to undo him, but the men keep talking unawares. Panic swells in him. It’s unproductive. He must have killed hundreds of people by now. After a while, he became somewhat immune, but this is different. Seunghyun can’t die.  
  
‘What do we have here?’  
  
‘A thief?’  
  
‘A dead man’.  
  
While the men talk, Jiyong pulls a vial of the formula from his pocket and carefully lines his bullets on the ground. He coats each with a few drops of clear liquid, then stashes the rest in a small holster around his belt. He shirks his jacket as quickly as possible and uses the sleeve to protect his fingers while he reloads the clip. If a single drop of this stuff touches his skin, it’s game over. All it will take is a nick or a cut, a single drop of blood and he’ll disappear forever. He’ll burn to death from the inside out.  
  
He has never done this before. He has always used the formula at close quarters or like a grenade. He has never tried to coat a bullet. Maybe it won’t work. There are a thousand variables but he has no time. There are too many men on the other side of the fence. Any one of them could kill Seunghyun when things kick off. Simply shooting them is too big a risk. He needs something big. He needs the men closest to Seunghyun to be confused and distracted. Long enough to give him the advantage. Long enough for Seunghyun to lay flat on the ground and get out of his way.  
  
When he has reloaded the clip, Jiyong kicks his jacket to the side, careful not to touch it with his skin. He leans against the fence with his shoulder against the slats and looks through a small gap. From here, he can see everything but they can’t see him. He has already calculated the quickest way in. There is a crate to his left that he can use to jump the fence. There are three guards around Seunghyun, four guarding the ship and at least ten more milling around. He needs one of them on the outskirts to come close enough for a clean shot. If he shoots one of the men by Seunghyun, he risks injuring him. He needs someone else to be the distraction.  
  
‘How many of you are there?’ the man closest to Seunghyun asks.  
  
‘Just me. There’s no-one else’.  
  
‘Bullshit’.  
  
‘I came alone. I’m just trying to feed myself. _Please--_ I need money for food.’ Seunghyun bows forward, touching his head to the ground like he is praying. He suddenly seems frail. His shoulders shake and his hands tremble and he sits back on his knees, rocking back and forth like a child afraid. He blubbers like an infant.  
  
Jiyong watches Seunghyun become a different person. Seunghyun pleads for his life. He tells these men what it’s like to be scared and poor. He tells them he eats rats to stay alive and steals scraps from people weaker. He is a snivelling mess. He begs them to join the cartel. He says he has skills that might be useful to them. He tries to bargain for his life and the men laugh in his face.  
  
The act is so well rehearsed, Jiyong almost believes him. The transformation is instantaneous and so thorough, Seunghyun must have rehearsed it in his head a thousand times. This is a contingency plan they never talked about. He is buying time. Seunghyun appears so broken and pathetic, the men don’t press him on whether he really did come alone. They mock him instead. They laugh at him. They don’t ask how he got inside a closed airfield, or why the three guards lying dead on the perimeter didn’t do their jobs. They let their cruelty get the best of them and lower their defences.  
  
Jiyong’s jaw clenches and he waits for an opening. He keeps his eyes on every armed man he can see in the compound and one _finally_ inches closer. In twenty seconds, he’ll be close enough to take a shot. So, Jiyong plans. He calculates the force necessary to propel himself over the fence. He plots the trajectory of his bullet. Still, he has to wait long agonising seconds for the unlucky candidate to draw closer, which means he has to watch the man closest to Seunghyun push the muzzle of a gun into his mouth.  
  
‘Suck it,’ the man says.  
  
The others laugh. Jiyong’s fingers tighten uncomfortably on his gun. His body tenses. In fifteen seconds, he’s going to kill this man. Before, he was going to shoot him clean through the back of the skull. Now, he’s going to make him _suffer_.  
  
The man pushes the gun roughly into Seunghyun’s mouth as far as it will go then withdraws a little, repeating the motion, simulating a blow-job with the muzzle. He is twenty metres away but Jiyong can hear the metal clip Seunghyun’s teeth. He can see the fury in Seunghyun’s eyes. He sees Seunghyun’s fingers tighten into fists. He is going to lash out but he has to wait.  
  
_Wait for me_ , Jiyong thinks. _Just wait.  
  
_ The approaching man is still too far away for a clean shot so Jiyong watches his plan unravel. Seunghyun can’t tolerate the humiliation. He snaps. He pulls the gun roughly out of his mouth and surges forward, knocking the first man off his feet. The other two pull him back before he can wrestle for the gun. He kicks out though. He makes it hard for them. He pulls free and shoves them away, teeming with anger.  
  
‘Get away. _Go,_ ’ he shouts. Then, looking up at the fence-line, perilously close to Jiyong’s hiding place, Seunghyun yells it again more emphatically. His voice cracks. ‘ _I mean it._ Go’.  
  
Jiyong’s lips part in surprise. Seunghyun is talking to him. Seunghyun wants him to run. He thought Seunghyun’s beggar act was designed to buy time so he could save his life, but it wasn’t. He was giving him a chance to get away. Seunghyun wants him to escape and leave him here to die. Jiyong grinds his teeth and his throat tightens. They didn’t talk about what would happen if they failed, but this was never an option. Succeed or die together. That was the unspoken agreement.  
  
What is the alternative? Going home without him? To the place Seunghyun built with his bare hands? The place that has protected and shielded him? The underground bunker was the first place he ever felt safe. He could sleep with both eyes closed. Seunghyun _did_ that for him. Before they met, his entire life was built on fear. He can’t go back to that. He can’t walk away from what Seunghyun has become. He loves him. Real love. How many people know what that’s like anymore? Seunghyun is the only good thing left in the world. If he can’t have him, there’s no point going on.  
  
Seunghyun’s plea stops suddenly. The first man, back on his feet, kicks Seunghyun in the head unexpectedly. He connects so hard with the side of his face, Seunghyun’s head snaps back and he hits the ground barely conscious. Jiyong jumps at the sudden violence. On the ground, Seunghyun’s eyes are open but unfocussed. Jiyong blinks back tears and panic flares in him again. Seunghyun’s lips part and he mumbles something inaudible.  
  
One of the men laughs and shakes his head.  
  
‘What?’  
  
From behind the fence, Jiyong watches Seunghyun’s eyes find his own somehow. _He knows I’m here_. Seunghyun repeats himself. Without hearing him, Jiyong can read his lips.  
  
_I love you._  
  
One of the men raises his gun to Seunghyun’s head.  
  
He is out of time.  
  
Jiyong springs to his feet and moves. He jumps the fence and hits the ground hard on the other side, sprinting twenty feet before anyone sees him. He feels the old wound in his side split open but adrenaline dulls the pain. He shoots the man aiming for Seunghyun’s head and the effect is instantaneous. The formula coating the bullets wasn’t burned off when he fired, like he feared might happen. Flames erupt from the man’s skin and consume him. He screams and wails.  
  
While the other two are dazed, Jiyong throws an arm out and shoots someone on his periphery while still running toward Seunghyun. He can’t let anyone get behind him. One of the remaining men at Seunghyun’s side aims his gun but Jiyong shoots him first. A third wall of fire fans up into the sky. Shocking screams fill the air and the smell of burning flesh is instantly nauseating. Seunghyun is low enough to the ground that he is out of serious danger. A few minor burns maybe, but better that than dead. The third man runs.  
  
Jiyong has to pursue him but he reaches Seunghyun first and grabs a fistful of his shirt, using all his strength to drag him across the airfield to cover. Seunghyun scarcely makes a sound while he drags him, he is barely awake. By now, a cacophony of voices and shouts cross the tarmac. It makes it seem like there are a thousand people instead of twenty. Jiyong drops Seunghyun behind a metal container.  
  
' _Don’t’ move!’_  
  
He doesn’t have time to check him over. He has to get on top of this situation. He has no chance at defence, there are too many of them. He has to go on the offensive. It’s the only way they can survive this. He can't give them time to think. He unbuttons the small holster on his hip in preparation. The remaining formula he has can be used like a grenade. He skirts the inside perimeter of the field where there is sporadic cover. There are at least fifteen men, but some are distracted. One of the burning men has run toward the group like a fireball before collapsing. The men have scattered. They’re confused.    
  
Jiyong gets close enough to throw the vial into a small cluster of them, then empties his clip in the same direction. As flames erupt in a cascade, he drops behind some stacked crates and crawls as fast as he can, unseen. He tries to get behind them. He has to take the rest out one by one. And he does. He has confused and surprised most of them enough that it’s easy to take some out. He stuns two without anyone seeing or hearing him. He sneaks up behind them and locks his elbow around their necks, slowly lowering them to the ground.  
  
Then, someone raises the alarm and the remaining men start to organise themselves. They shed some of their cowardice and surprise and he barely escapes the rain of bullets that follow. He didn’t pick up a gun from one of the bodies when he had the chance. Now, he is trapped behind a parked vehicle with nothing but a knife. A flurry of bullets hit the truck and it is deafening, like rain on a steel roof. He doesn’t have a lot of options. He can wait for them to get closer and try and outmanoeuvre them physically, or he can do it psychologically. He can bluff.  
  
A shout dispels his thoughts.  
_  
'Finish loading up and get her off the ground!’_  
  
Jiyong sees two men run for the ship on the other end of the tarmac. They lay hands on the last crate to be loaded. They’re going to take-off and finish the job. He can’t let that happen. That ship is the only chance they have. Once it’s gone, there will never be another.  
  
He closes his eyes and thinks about Seunghyun. The sound of bullets hitting metal quietens and Jiyong takes himself back to the first week they met. In their first encounter, Seunghyun lowered his weapon so Jiyong lowered his. He had never done that before. He couldn’t explain it. It was a discomfiting sign of things to come because when Seunghyun offered him a place to stay in gratitude for inadvertently saving his life, Jiyong accepted. He allowed himself to be alone with an armed stranger.  
  
More than that, the space Seunghyun had built for himself was small. Too large and it would attract attention, so there was one makeshift bed and they shared it. The first night, Jiyong didn’t sleep. He was too on edge and afraid. He was forever waiting for the knife to enter his back. The second night, he slept with one eye open, jumping awake at the slightest sound or movement. By the fourth night, he allowed himself to sleep. _Real_ sleep. When he woke up, the world hadn’t ended and for the first time in his life, a little bit of tension lifted.  
  
Weeks later on a cold night, Seunghyun held him from behind for warmth and something in Jiyong cracked. Seunghyun was the first person to ever touch him in kindness. Over time, he wanted to touch Seunghyun in return. He didn’t know why. He felt powerful when Seunghyun fell asleep in front of him. That kind of trust was rare, and instead of thinking how he could use it to his advantage, he eventually felt tenderness. He wanted to protect him.  
  
It took months of slowly chipping away at each other, but there came a day when Jiyong kissed Seunghyun and Seunghyun kissed him back, and things took off. He felt things with Seunghyun, physically and emotionally, that he didn’t know he could feel. Human kindness was so alien to him, to them both--- it took them by surprise. But once they had it? Their hiding place underground became the whole world. It was the only thing that mattered. Maybe it was foolish but there was implicit and unconditional trust between them. Jiyong felt Seunghyun’s worth in his soul. He felt an iron connection between them that wouldn’t be severed.  
  
If he doesn’t kill these men now, there won’t be a second chapter. The years they have spent together will amount to nothing. He can’t let that happen. They deserve more than this. They deserve more time. So, something in Jiyong loosens and unravels and the stress of the situation dissipates. A calm washes over him that he has never felt before, like a shield encasing him. He becomes hyper focussed and he lets go. When he first started killing people, it was always self-defence. He was fighting for his life. Then, as time wore on and he got the contract with the cartel, he killed for money. He told himself that was another kind of survival. That he needed it.  
  
In this moment, it isn’t enough to think about Seunghyun and to fight for a better life. The odds are stacked against him. He is pinned and surrounded and he only has a knife. Love doesn’t conquer all. He has to be better. He has to be something else.  
  
So, he becomes an animal. One that has been cornered and has nothing left to lose. He grips the knife tightly in his hand and rolls out from behind the truck and charges. He throws his knife and it enters a man’s chest. Jiyong retrieves it with record speed. He uses his size and deftness and inflicts as much damage as possible. He slices heels and throats, he stabs people, he uses others as a shield. He goes for arteries, limbs and eyes. He runs directly into the fray. It confuses them. Most of their bullets miss him. One gets him in the shoulder and another grazes his leg.  
  
He falls into someone and acts on instinct. Before they can react, Jiyong slices the man’s throat open. Blood sprays across his face and neck from the opening. He recognises this man, blood gurgling from his opened artery. He’s the one who shoved a gun into Seunghyun’s mouth. Rage overwhelms Jiyong. He switches hands, blade down, and drives his knife through the man’s right eye.  
  
The rest of it unfolds like a blur. He becomes a monster. He uses every trick and skill and advantage and he slaughters them. It is a massacre. He cuts them open indiscriminately and he doesn’t kill them quickly. He makes some of them suffer. When there is no-one left standing, he reaches the ship with a limp and the last two men, neither a pilot, drop their weapons. They sink to their knees at the sight of him. Looking down, every part of him is stained with blood. It drips from his fingers. He has walked bloody footprints to this spot.  
  
The two men plead for their lives. They cry and beg for mercy. And he doesn’t give it. He picks up one of the discarded guns and shoots them both in the head.  
  
Behind him, there is devastation. Charred, blackened bodies pepper the lot, some still on fire. Other bodies are scattered across the tarmac with pools of blood expanding outwards. Bloody footprints lead here and there. He has killed all of these people. In the back of his mind, he understands the gravity of it, but the greater part of him begins to shut down. He killed people who had their backs turned, people who were running away. He killed people who were no threat to him, who begged for their lives. He did that and he feels nothing.  
  
He stands there, immobile, his brain shutting down at the sight of it and the adrenaline starts to fade. He has been shot three times and his old wound has reopened. Seunghyun staggers into view on his periphery, only just now coming-to. Jiyong sees Seunghyun’s shock at his appearance.  
  
‘I did it,’ Jiyong says quietly. ‘I killed them’.  
  
A trickle of blood has dried down the side of Seunghyun’s face. He touches his head, groggy as he approaches. He is unsteady on his feet. Seunghyun looks at the gruesome scene across the tarmac and shakes his head, reaching an arm out.  
  
‘We have to go. Get on the ship’.  
  
Jiyong turns to the small vessel now loaded with crates of illegal arms. He takes a step toward the stairs and then stops. He wobbles. Then, like a blanket has been thrown over him, it all goes dark.

  
  
  
* * *

  
When he wakes up, he isn’t really awake. He feels the thrum of an engine beneath him and that subtle pressure on the body that comes from being on a moving ship. Seunghyun speaks to him but he sounds far away.  
  
‘Open your eyes, Jiyong’.  
  
They _are_ open, he thinks. They are open but it’s dark. He should look around and figure out what’s going on, but he can’t move. Or maybe he doesn’t want to. It’s nice in the dark. It’s safe. So he stays there and eventually, Seunghyun’s voice quietens and he is alone again.  
  
This happens a lot. Seunghyun’s voice rouses him in the darkness time and time again. When it does, Jiyong feels a pang in his heart but he doesn’t answer. Something stops him. He simply waits until Seunghyun goes away. He wants to stay in the nothingness. He doesn’t know why, but his heart tells him it’s what’s best.  
  
One day, when Seunghyun’s voice rouses him Jiyong opens his eyes to light instead of dark. It’s so foreign to him and so harsh, he wants to scream and fight but he doesn’t. His heart pounds in his chest and he waits. He makes himself small. Eventually, light gives way to dark.  
  
Over time, things start to take shape in the light. He opens his eyes to new shapes that eventually gain focus. Trees. Grass. Sounds slowly come to him. He hears birds in the distance and wind rustling the leaves. It takes time. He doesn’t know how long, time has lost meaning for him, but eventually he opens his eyes and finds that he is _somewhere_. He turns his head and feels grass on his cheek. He can see rows of trees laid out before him, and fruit on the ground and in the branches.  
  
_‘Oranges.’_  
  
The voice is so rough and quiet he doesn’t recognise it. It isn’t until there’s an answer that he realises it was his own.  
  
‘It’s an orange grove,’ Seunghyun says.  
  
Jiyong turns his head the other way but can’t see him. He wants to stand and look for him, but he is weak. He just lays where he is, back against the grass and stares through the trees. A bird lands on a branch of the tree closest to him and fans its wings, burying its head beneath one, grooming itself.  
  
‘It’s nice,’ Jiyong whispers.  
  
‘Good’.  
  
Over time, Seunghyun talks to him more often and Jiyong starts to remember bits and pieces of his life. It wasn’t obvious to him before but in the darkness, he had no memory of himself, no ability to stay in the moment. In the orange grove, Seunghyun talks about himself. He talks about his childhood and growing up. He talks about technical things. He describes the way he builds machines. He talks for the sake of talking and things become familiar.  
  
‘And that’s when I built the first door in---’  
  
_‘Songpa.’_  
  
‘That’s right.’  
  
Through that, Jiyong remembers himself and his past. He remembers their life together. He remembers the stench of burning flesh and the metallic taste of blood in his mouth. He hears peoples screams in his head on an out-of-the-way airfield.  
  
‘I killed those people’.  
  
‘Yes’.  
  
‘Why?’  
  
‘To survive’.  
  
In the orange grove, Jiyong finally sits up and the breeze blows through his hair.  
  
‘I think I enjoyed it’.

  
**\- END of FLASHBACK -  
  
  
  
**

 

After he collapsed on the airfield, Seunghyun dragged him onto the ship and got them out of there. In the weeks leading up to it, he had stolen schematics and manuals for the most commonly used cartel ships. By the grace of a higher power, he managed to fly the ship off the planet and kept the auto-pilot on part-way, out of any navigable danger around Earth’s atmosphere, then he did what they originally planned. He flew them to the farthest reaches of the solar system, to a lawless asteroid that no-one without a death wish would ever go to. It took weeks to get there. The ship wasn’t equipped for fast travel. It was a trading vessel and had the speed of one. He patched Jiyong up physically as best he could but the mind was something else. Something in Jiyong had snapped on that airfield and his brain had shut down. He was catatonic.  
  
When they reached the asteroid, he was still out of it so Seunghyun had to navigate one of the most dangerous places in the system on his own. Seunghyun sold the arms onboard for money and found somewhere distant enough from any settlement to hide until Jiyong recovered. Most people couldn’t do what Seunghyun did. It was super-human.  
  
Jiyong relates as much as he can remember to Rani and throws in things Seunghyun told him afterwards. He blends them into a coherent story.  
  
‘Seunghyun spoke to me through that simulation for weeks. He pieced my brain back together. He saved my life. If he hadn’t done that for me, I wouldn’t have made it. I would have starved to death, catatonic, unwilling to wake up’.  
  
Rani frowns ambiguously.  
  
‘Why do it through a sim though? And where did he get it? Did he make it?’  
  
‘No, the sim was on board the ship. But it took time for my brain to process the stimuli, I suppose. I only saw it slowly. Like waking up from a dream. So, it felt safe. Without the sim, Seunghyun wasn’t getting through to me. I remember hearing his voice but not wanting to wake up,’ Jiyong says. ‘He found a way to reach me’.  
  
‘So why do you still use them? Because they feel safe?’  
  
‘Not exactly,’ Jiyong answers. ‘When Seunghyun put me back together, I had to come to terms with what I did on that airfield and all the people I killed before that. On Earth, I could rationalise the murders. They were self-defence initially, then they were for money which was another way for us to survive. That’s just another form of self-defence. But that day on the airstrip was different. I didn’t have to kill them all. There was a point when I could have stopped and I didn’t’.  
  
‘You couldn’t have left them alive,’ Rani says. ‘The survivors would have alerted the cartel before you even left the atmosphere. They would have shot you out of the sky or lain in wait somewhere in the system’.  
  
‘Maybe. Maybe not’.  
  
‘This is a bizarre situation to feel guilty about. They weren’t good people. Who cares if you killed them?’  
  
‘I didn’t care’ Jiyong answers. ‘I never cared. It was easy to kill them. I’m so good at what I do that even injured, I still killed them all. Even the ones running away. Even the ones who asked for mercy’.

Rani frowns.  
  
‘Loving Seunghyun made me realise that it’s possible to care for other human beings, it’s possible to have empathy and selflessness. But I didn’t have it for other people. Just him. Earth did that to me. What Seunghyun did for me in that sim set us on the path to being mercenaries. I was good at killing people and there was money to be made in space just like there was on Earth. He taught me it was okay to be that person’.  
  
Rani’s lips part but he closes them in surprise. A moment later, he blurts it out.  
  
‘That’s not what I expected you to say. I thought you would say he made you feel better about being a glorified serial killer’.  
  
‘Seunghyun is pragmatic. He understands what it takes to survive,’ Jiyong answers. ‘But he also taught me love and empathy, so we choose our jobs carefully. The people I kill need to be bad people in some respect. They have to deserve it,’ Jiyong says. ‘The simulations bring me peace and clarity. They remind me to stay in control. That day on the tarmac, I lost control. So I still use sims. I like to keep one foot in that other mind,’ Jiyong clarifies. ‘Walking around a sim like _Paradise_ , the streets are filled with happy people. People who get along and co-exist without a gun or a knife in sight. I get to imagine a peaceful, safer life with the man I love and I get a reminder that not everyone deserves to die’.  
  
‘You need a reminder?’  
  
‘The more people you kill, the easier it gets,’ Jiyong says honestly. ‘Seunghyun and I carry Earth in our heads and our hearts. It’s hard to let go of the instinct to kill or be killed. But I know there are people out there like _you._ People born on colonies who have never had to kill someone for a mouthful of food. The sims keep that truth in my mind. Without them, doing this job, I would start to forget’.  
  
Rani shifts his weight and he drops his gaze.  
  
‘You just sound like a headcase to me’.  
  
Jiyong smiles and picks up the laces of his boots again, slowly lacing them through the pain in his shoulder. Rani turns and leaves but returns a moment later.  
  
‘Hey, who were you talking to when I first walked in?’ he asks, tapping his temple to suggest a node. ‘In your fantasy world. It sounded intimate’.  
  
Jiyong answers without looking up.  
  
‘I was talking to Seunghyun. He wrote a simulacrum of himself into the sim’.  
  
_‘Why?’_  
  
‘It aids the fantasy’.  
  
‘How so?’  
  
Jiyong slips his second boot on and looks up.  
  
‘You know, you don’t get forgiveness for the things you’ve done,’ he says. ‘You can only accept them and move on. I’ve done that. The sims are just the roads not taken. They let me fantasize about a world where Seunghyun and I are clean. I get to fantasize about realities where he has never suffered. I get to see worlds where Seunghyun could be unconditionally happy, and then I tell him about them. _My_ Seunghyun, that is. When we lay in bed at night, I tell him stories about these other people we could be’.  
  
‘To what end?’  
  
‘To no end,’ Jiyong answers. ‘It’s just a distraction. I’m selfish and I want us to be happy. I want us to pretend that we’re good. Even if it’s only for a few minutes. I like the shared dream. That’s all’.  
  
Rani frowns and shakes his head.  
  
_‘Jesus’._  
  
Then, he’s gone.  
  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Here's](http://i67.tinypic.com/24evu44.png) a doodle i did a few months ago that sits in this chapter.
> 
> I decided to throw in one more chapter with some backstory before everything starts going down. There won't be too many chapters after that. Ten or less for the whole fic. I'll try and start on the next chapter now while I have the chance. I would like to finish all my ongoing stories and series (inje universe) by June-ish.


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